If you remember the 2000s, you remember the Pussycat Dolls.
The pop group was active in their original incarnation from 2003 to 2010, and one of its members was Ashley Roberts — and, according to a new interview she gave to the Times UK, her stint as a Pussycat Doll was really rough on her well-being.
In the interview, Ashley describes the Pussycat Dolls’ rise as “a fast, extreme rocket ship.” “I remember being on stage in New York with the crowd singing back the lyrics and thinking, ‘Oh, this is really happening,'” she recalls.
“There were no discussions around, ‘How is your mental health?’ It was a different era. Now, artists are coming forward to talk about their struggles and concerts are rejigged.”
As Ashley recounts in the interview, the hectic schedule of being a 2000s pop star — which at one point included being in three countries in one day — began to wear on her physically. “Eventually, my body just got to the point of shutdown,” she says. “I was really, really sick.”
Eventually, Ashley’s health deteriorated to the point where she was admitted to the hospital in London — where doctors initially diagnosed her with suffering from a brain aneurysm.
As it turns out, her symptoms were brought on by the stress of the Pussycat Dolls’ intense schedule — which was hard to bring to a full halt even as Ashley was clearly suffering. “I remember saying [in the hospital], ‘I need to get on a flight to Germany. I’ve got a show to do,'” she says. “‘You gotta give me something.’ That was the mentality. I was having extreme headaches, being sick. They found viral arthritis in my knee. I couldn’t do anything, really.”
Even when Ashley eventually left the group in 2010, she says that she was still suffering from “eczema all over my legs, shingles across my face and a stomach ulcer.”
“It was a manifestation of ‘go, go, go’ for years or ‘grind, grind, grind’, an accumulation of being on the road at a time when nobody really spoke up about anything,” she says. “There was also this feeling that we could be replaced in some way.”
You can read the entire interview here.
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