F$CK IT

There is a trend—I know you’ve all seen it—on Instagram (and possibly TikTok, although I’m not on that platform myself). This trend is called the We Don’t Care Club, created by @justbeingmelani. It’s basically a club for perimenopausal women, at least that seems to be what the original intention was. There is also another trend started by she-who-I-won’t-name because she stole the concept from a writer named Cassie Phillips (Sage Justice wrote a piece on this here on Substack). And as recent as this morning, I watched another reel on IG from another perimenopausal lady talking about “F&ck Them” as her movement instead of “Let Them”.

This is not a new—ladies in their mid-life years, coping with what used to be called “the change,” who are tired. That’s what this is all about, by the way. Women are TIRED. What is new is that it has become socially acceptable, monetized on social media, and trendy. This is good news for me: I just turned 50 on Friday, June 13th. Two thoughts on that day and date: 1. I was born on Friday, June 13th, 1975, and 2. I’m so glad I was not born one day later.

When we say “we don’t care” or “let them” or “fuck them” it’s not in anger or rage. It’s fatigue. It’s realizing we are over halfway to the end. It’s knowing that if we don’t stop pushing ourselves to be the social construct called Perfect, we will wind up like women in previous generations. We will be like my grandmother, who became a wife and mother in the post-WWII era and who, in her early mid-life, ran off to a mental institution twice and a sufi camp once to escape the pressure of her traditional stay-at-home wife/mother life. Or, we will be like the women in the late Victorian era, such as the nameless narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper (although the narrator's namelessness is debatable), who is so oppressed and gaslit by her husband that she loses her mind and hallucinates that a woman is trapped in the wallpaper of her bedroom.

Women have not been ok for centuries.

My girlfriends and I talk about it constantly. WE ARE F%CKING TIRED of a lot of sh$t. We are done worrying about whether we are thin enough, smart enough, good enough, or pretty enough. We are so over if we are good enough mothers, daughters, friends, spouses, bosses, and employees. We are no longer saying “yes” when we mean “no”. We are no longer feeling guilty about saying “no.” We no longer care if we disappoint, frustrate, or annoy you with our irritability, erratic sex drive, crepey skin, and bloat.

We are simultaneously caring for our drying-out selves, our tweens/teens/ young adults, and our aging or dying parents. We aren’t retiring (because we can’t afford to). We are reinventing ourselves, over and over again, for financial, emotional, and essential reasons. By the way, this is not what we want to do; it’s what we have to do. It’s survival.

Women have tolerated the pressure of Perfection for way too long. My generation can no longer take it. The levee, the bough, the camel’s back—all have broken.

We are done.

F$CK IT.