Has Aging Turned You Into a Hot Mess?

In just one day, 200,000 women joined her club, many posting their own videos and declaring that they, too, simply do not care.

Within six weeks, Sanders had been profiled in The New York Times and nabbed a book deal.

“The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook: A Hot-Mess Guide for Women in Perimenopause, Menopause and Beyond Who Are Over It” came out in January 2026, climbing to No. 2 on The New York Times bestseller list.

She was on The Drew Barrymore Show alongside Halle Berry and Valerie Bertinelli, who both proclaimed they do not care. She was interviewed by Gayle King and Sherri Shepherd. Do they care? Heck, no!

Sherri added a few announcements of her own: “We Do Not Care if we called you by the wrong name. You’re gonna be who we say you are. We Do Not Care if we cannot remember the name of that thing we were talking about earlier. Congratulations, you are now a translator. We Do Not Care if we are wearing sweatpants but won’t be working out. The pants match the stage of life we are in. At least we’re matching.”

“It is so freeing to be OK with not caring so much,” Sanders said on The Drew Barrymore Show. Bertinelli chimed in: “We’ve all been feeling it but were afraid to say it…now we’re a big family. We just don’t care!”

“For us, midlife is bigger than aging,” Sanders explains in her book. “It’s about waking up and deciding that we’re no longer doing things that don’t serve us anymore. It’s not that we don’t care about our families, our futures, or ourselves, but by force or by choice, WDNC members have stopped caring about being perfect, being liked, being small, or fitting in. We have started caring about being honest.”

Sanders’ parking-lot moment led her to being named People magazine’s 2025 “Creator of the Year” — with 2.2 million followers on Instagram, 1.5 million on TikTok, 1.5 million on Facebook and 71,500 subscribers on YouTube.

Melani and I both live in West Palm Beach, Florida, and have mutual friends. I’m almost 70 and old enough to be Melani’s mama. But age doesn’t matter in the club. In fact, young women who can’t appreciate an elastic waistband can just “sit down and be quiet,” she says.

Cue these examples from Melani’s videos:

“We Do Not Care what the 20-year-old influencers are telling us we can’t wear over 60. You have no idea what’s coming, Sugar.”

“We Do Not Care if you still wear a thong. We are content with our granny panties. And a leak-guard panty liner.”

“We Do Not Care if we hurt the younger generation’s feelings. We said what we said."

Melani and I talked a few days before she left on her sold-out book tour of eight cities, from New York to Chicago to her hometown of Atlanta and south to Miami.

“On May 13, when I gained hundreds of thousands of followers in a day, I was scared to death,” she told me. “I didn’t understand my value, my worth. I thought, ‘Why me?’ That imposter syndrome kicked in.”

“I had to decide, do you want to lead a movement or don’t you? If you’re gonna play it scared, then go sit down.”

Sanders decided to embrace it: the fame, the fans, the sponsorships, the work. 

“We’ve all got this one life — do I want to advocate for women and bring awareness? Absolutely, and I’m still a mother, still a wife and I’m in perimenopause! I gotta pace myself.”

“Miss Peri” blew into Sanders’ life like a bomb cyclone in September 2024, when she had a hysterectomy. She simply did not care much anymore — like many of the 1.3 million American women who enter menopause each year, according to a study on menopause by AARP.

If talking about dry she-sheds makes other folks uncomfortable, too bad, she states. “We’re uncomfortable all the damn time.”

That’s the beauty of the We Do Not Care Club: the frank and funny truth, as preached by Melani Sanders.

“In all of this, the two words that mean a lot to me are inclusiveness and empathy,” she told me. “There’s no color, no religion, no caring about your car or what you’re wearing. When we’re just bare-butt naked and able to be OK with who we are, there is something in that. If you’re born with a she-shed, you can be in this club.”

And speaking of…

“I was on TikTok one night, around 9 p.m.,” recalls Melani. “I was live, and I started referring to my ‘hot pocket,’ and I thought, I better stop because Hot Pockets, the food company, is going to call me, and I said that live, and pretty soon, thousands of women chimed in with what they call their ‘thunder down under.’ It was so funny — all these sisters from around the world finding so much joy in the names we give our girls.”

Even her mother, Pat, couldn’t resist. “I come by my personality honestly,” Melani confessed. “When I went home recently, my mom started hollering, ‘I pushed her out of my she-shed!’”

Jan Tuckwood is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the co-author of “Too Young to Be Old,” the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen.”