Ashley Roberts, the Pussycat Dolls, and the Girls We Used to Be.

Camille Roe S.

8 hours ago

5 min read

On growing up with the Pussycat Dolls, meeting your childhood idols, and discovering that becoming a woman might be the most empowering thing of all.

When I was a little girl, the Pussycat Dolls were everything.

And like most little girls growing up with a girl band, my sister Sophia and I naturally found the ones we identified with most. You know how it is. There's always that one member you see a little bit of yourself in. For Sophia, it was Nicole Scherzinger. For me, it was Ashley Roberts. Maybe because we thought we resembled them, maybe because something about their personalities felt familiar. Either way, those were our girls, and we took our roles very seriously.

We knew the songs. We knew the choreography. We would dance around the house, singing lyrics we were far too young to fully understand, convinced we were putting on the performance of a lifetime. I even remember convincing my teachers to let my friends and me perform choreographed routines during gym class. Looking back, the confidence was quite extraordinary. The talent? Debatable.

But those are some of my happiest childhood memories. So when I found myself backstage in Paris, about to interview Ashley Roberts before the Pussycat Dolls' concert, I couldn't quite comprehend what was happening. Sophia had insisted I take the lead on the interview. After all, I was always Ashley. It only made sense.

And suddenly, there she was. The woman I had spent countless hours pretending to be, sitting across from me, almost twenty years later.I was no longer that little girl. I was a woman in my thirties, interviewing one of my childhood idols for a magazine my sister and I had built together.

Life has a rather beautiful sense of humour sometimes.

We're women now.

When I asked Ashley why this felt like the right moment for the Pussycat Dolls to return, her answer stayed with me.

"We're women now."

Three simple words. Ashley explained how, over the years, each member had lived an entirely different life. Kimberly had built a successful broadcasting career, launched her own dance academy, and become a wife and mother. Nicole had performed for audiences around the world, while conquering the West End and Broadway. Ashley had forged her own path as a presenter, author and wellness advocate, exploring everything from breathwork to studying neuroscience. They had become people beyond the identities the world first knew them for.

"I feel even more fierce than I did in my 20s," Ashley told me.

Something about that felt incredibly reassuring. Because growing up, we're constantly being told that our twenties are supposed to be our prime. The years when we're most desirable, most exciting, most beautiful. As though everything afterwards is some slow, inevitable decline.

And yet here was Ashley, 45 years old, preparing to walk onto a sold-out Paris stage in a Pussycat Dolls costume, feeling more powerful in her own skin than ever before. Not trying to recreate the woman she was twenty years ago. Celebrating the woman she is today. I think there's something deeply empowering about that.

The women we thought we understood

There's another funny thing about growing up with the Pussycat Dolls. As children, we loved their music because it made us feel confident, glamorous, and perhaps a little more grown-up than we actually were. We didn't necessarily understand what we were singing. We just knew how it made us feel.

Now, listening to those same songs as adult women, everything lands differently. Ashley laughed about that too. When you're young, she explained, you sing along feeling cute and sassy. When you're older, you actually understand what it means to own that confidence.

And perhaps that's why their return feels so special. The music hasn't changed. We have.

Songs that once made us pretend to be powerful women now remind us that we've become them, in our own ways. When Ashley asked me about my favourite song, I immediately thought of Don't Cha. I told her about the countless hours I'd spent dancing to their music. She asked whether I still knew the choreography. Naturally, I told her I could do it. Just not right then. Some things are better left to the imagination.

There's no expiration date on being a woman

During our conversation, Ashley told me something else that I haven't stopped thinking about.

"Be fun, be messy, be authentic. Just live it while you're here."

We spend so much of our lives as women trying to become the right version of ourselves. The right body. The right career. The right relationship. The right age to accomplish everything.

And somehow, even empowerment has become another standard we're expected to meet.

But sitting with Ashley, I realised how much more interesting womanhood becomes when we stop treating it as something we have to perfect.

Ashley spoke openly about the rituals that help her stay grounded: breathwork, movement, mindfulness, gratitude. Practices she didn't necessarily have in her twenties, when she was simply getting onstage and performing.

Now she approaches those moments with intention. She wants to feel connected to herself, to enjoy the experience, and to share that energy with the other women beside her. There's a quiet kind of strength in knowing yourself well enough to understand what you need. And there's something wonderful about watching women return to something they loved, not because they have anything left to prove, but because they still love doing it.

For the little girls we used to be

Ashley told us that during the first concert of their reunion tour in Copenhagen, she cried onstage. The audience was singing every word. People from different generations had come together, carrying their own memories of the music. During Stickwitu, the crowd held up their lights, and the women became emotional.

I found that incredibly touching. Because I don't think artists always realise the places they occupy in other people's lives. To Ashley, those songs are part of her career. To Sophia and me, they're part of our childhood. They're afternoons spent dancing, laughing, imagining our futures, and feeling completely free. And now, all these years later, we get to meet the women behind those memories.

Before we finished, I asked Ashley what she hoped young girls watching the Pussycat Dolls today would take away from them, beyond the music. Her answer was simple: be yourself, enjoy who you are, and be kind to yourself. And dance. Always dance.

I think about the little girl I used to be, standing in front of a mirror pretending to be Ashley Roberts. She had no idea where life would take her. She certainly didn't know she'd one day sit backstage in Paris, interviewing the woman she admired, with her sister beside her. But I think she'd be very happy. Not just because she finally met Ashley. But because between those childhood dance routines and this interview, she grew into a woman who followed her own dreams. And perhaps that's what the Pussycat Dolls represent to me now.

Not simply the confidence of being young and beautiful, but the freedom to keep becoming yourself, at every age, through every version of womanhood.

Twenty years later, Ashley is still Ashley. Sophia and I have grown into women with dreams and stories of our own. And somehow, we're all still dancing to the same songs. Only this time, we understand the words.