The Quiet Breaking Point So Many Women Reach in Perimenopause

For many women, perimenopause does not begin with a medical diagnosis. It begins with a moment.

On The Tamsen Show, founder of the We Do Not Care Club, Melani Sanders, describes sitting in her car after a routine grocery run, replaying the same internal script so many women know well… 

“You should be doing more.” “You used to care more.” “What happened to you?”

Instead of pushing back harder, she stopped. She recognized that she was not lazy, broken, or giving up, but she was at capacity.

That realization matters because emotional exhaustion in midlife is often framed as personal failure. Melani reframes it as information. Her body and mind were signaling that the load she had carried for decades no longer fit the same way.

This moment resonated because it named something women rarely say out loud. The pressure to keep functioning at the same level, even as energy, hormones, and emotional bandwidth shift, can become unbearable.

Saying “I don’t care” was not about disengagement, it was about survival. It was the first step toward releasing self-judgment and recognizing that something real had changed.

If you want to learn more, listen to this episode on The Tamsen Show podcast.