Unpainted toenails. Chin hairs. Separating laundry by darks, lights and colors. Dress codes.
What do women in perimenopause and menopause have to say about these things? We do not care.
That is the message being spread by Melani Sanders, a 45-year-old mother of three and social media influencer in West Palm Beach, Fla., who has gained a huge following for celebrating women of a certain age who have stopped trying to please everyone. Hundreds of thousands of women around the world have responded to Ms. Sanders’ call to share what they no longer care about. They’re now all members of her “We Do Not Care” Club.
In viral videos, Ms. Sanders rattles off their responses. She peers out from behind her reading glasses (with another two pairs tucked into her T-shirt collar) and deadpans: “We do not care about arm fat. It’s not our fault our muscles grow down and not up.”
She looks down at her notebook, checking off that submission with a pen before moving onto the next one.
“We do not care if we don’t show up for the family cookout. Most of y’all have undiagnosed trauma that we honestly just don’t want to deal with right now.”
In an interview, Ms. Sanders said that she spent decades caring for others, and caring about what others thought of her — fixating on whether her sons ate all their vegetables, for example, or applying makeup before leaving the house. Now, she said, “it feels liberating just to free my mind from caring so much about things that don’t truly matter.”
By almost all accounts, the years leading up to menopause are a time of physical and emotional upheaval. Perimenopause can bring testiness, fatigue and brain fog. On top of that, it typically starts when a woman is in her mid-40s — a time when she may be dealing with moody teenagers and the sizable demands of work and aging parents, said Dr. Nanette Santoro, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who specializes in perimenopause.
“Your body is tired, you’re irritable, you have rage,” said Ms. Sanders, who entered perimenopause (or “Miss Peri,” as she calls it) after a partial hysterectomy in September 2024. First, the insomnia hit. Depression followed not long after.
“I was just in a dark place,” she said. “If there was good going on in the day, I couldn’t celebrate it.”
After one sleepless night last month, Ms. Sanders caught a glimpse of herself in her car’s rearview mirror: Her hair was disheveled, and she was wearing an ill-fitting sports bra. Instead of feeling self-conscious about her appearance as she once would have, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“You just get to the point — I don’t care anymore,” she thought. So she opened up her phone camera and pressed record.
“We about to start a perimenopause and menopause club, OK? And it’s gonna be called the ‘We Do Not Care’ club,” Ms. Sanders announced from behind her steering wheel in a grocery store parking lot. She listed what wasn’t bothering her that morning: that she couldn’t find a “real bra” to wear, and that she left the house without applying edge control to smooth her hair.
“In the comments, let’s all talk about what we don’t care about today,” she said.
Ms. Sanders, who at the time had a few hundred thousand followers on Instagram and TikTok from her posts about the messiness of marriage and motherhood, thought a few dozen women might weigh in. “Who’s joining our New CLUB? WDNC Club is going to be the talk of the town,” she joked in the video’s caption.
It was. Thousands of comments poured in, and she gained hundreds of thousands of additional followers across Instagram and TikTok in just 24 hours.
“I don’t care that my family thinks I’m crazy because I sit on the couch with a heated blanket and with the fan blowing on me,” one person wrote.
“We do not care if you wanted something different for dinner than what we made. We didn’t see you offer to cook dinner,” another commented.
Even Ashley Judd, the actress and mental health advocate, has joined the club.
Some of the things Ms. Judd, 57, doesn’t care about? Television, bathing every day and whether her nightgown had stains on it. (It did.)
Also, spelling.
“I do not care that I …” she paused in one video, squinting at the paper she was holding up, which read “We do not care cub.”
“Left the ‘L’ out of the word ‘club,’” she said.
When Shelly Horton, an Australian journalist, first saw Ms. Sanders’s video on her Instagram feed, “I was laughing so much I was crying.”
“As much as it is hilarious, it’s also really meaningful,” said Ms. Horton, 51, who made her own video listing things women in Australia no longer care about (liking dogs more than humans, hiding their age — “we have earned every damn month,” she insisted). The open conversation around perimenopause and menopause might encourage more women to seek medical care instead of letting their symptoms spiral, she said.
Talking about menopause, once shrouded in secrecy, has become a business unto itself. Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz have invested in a menopause-focused telehealth startup. Halle Berry built a company that promises to help women through the transition. There are now dozens of podcasts all about menopause, and even a new sitcom about two Gen X women going through it.
“When I first went into practice, women wouldn’t even come to a doctor because they thought this is something that has to happen and they’re not allowed to complain,” said Dr. Lila Nachtigall, 91, a reproductive endocrinologist who has specialized in menopause research and education for nearly 60 years.
“Now, menopause is all over the map,” she said.
For Ms. Sanders, who recently hit one million followers on TikTok, the explosion of interest has made her feel less alone and more in control. Her dream is to bring the W.D.N.C. community together offline, at a retreat where perimenopausal and menopausal women can “just be.” (The first rule for attendees: No fancy clothes, hair or makeup.)
The idea isn’t to stop caring about everything, she emphasized. Instead, “it’s more about taking the pressure off” when it comes to things that don’t truly matter, like maintaining a spotless house, and instead prioritizing what she needs to feel her best at this stage.
“Nothing is mandatory from this point but survival,” she said, laughing.
That means only taking the time to post videos once or twice a week, even though her inbox is filled with inquiries about lucrative partnerships that would require her to produce more. Instead, she makes time to take care of her own health and for family commitments, like cheering in the stands at her youngest son’s basketball games.
As she described those boundaries in a video interview, she gestured to her unmade bed and the clothes strewed around her bedroom. She’s experiencing perimenopause-related insomnia, and had only slept three hours the night before.
“I can’t care,” she shrugged. “Plain and simple.”
Chloe W. Shakin is a social media editor for The Times, based in London.
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