The "Hate Ashley Club"

After refusing to be Ginger Spice in a fourth-grade Spice Girls club, I accidentally became the target of something called the “Hate Ashley Club.” Thirty years later, I can see the deeper lesson hidden inside that experience: the people evaluating you are not always evaluating the same thing.

This week, I revisit one of the defining stories of my childhood and explore how rejection, value, and social approval shaped my understanding of sovereignty long before I had language for it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

I'm Ashley, and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life practicing sovereignty, living from truth, not wound, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Once upon a time in fourth grade, there was a Hate Ashley Club. And before you think that I am being hyperbolic, exaggerating, put a little sauce on it, it was literally called the Hate Ashley Club. And the members of this club were not random classmates, they were my friends. Or at least they had been. And so every day at lunch, they would sit together in their own section of the cafeteria and conduct the official business of hating me, right? And this went on for about a month. And then eventually our teacher found out about it. So we were all in the same class. And our teacher found out about it. Adults found out and he made us go to his office, all five of us. So the four members of the hate club plus me would have to get our lunch and take our lunch to his classroom and eat it there. And have mini therapy sessions, essentially. Um and that lasted for about a week and a half. And after the week and a half of therapy sessions, I mean, nine-year-old fourth grade girls are not complicated, kind of life went on. And then something really, really interesting happens that made this story a core memory beyond the fact of having a whole club dedicated to hating you. But what really solidified this as a core memory was about a month before graduation. And at the elementary school that I went to, we graduated in fourth grade. Middle school started at fifth grade. So I was a quote-unquote senior in elementary school, so to speak. And so this was all happening my senior year of elementary school. And uh this maybe happened in the spring as some months go by, and it's a little bit before graduation, and the same teacher comes up to me and tells me, long story short, we're gonna get to long version later. Long story short tells me that I was going to be our graduation speaker. I was going to be our valedictorian. And this incident is where I started doing what I'll call social math. And people often ask me how I seem to carry social ostracism or the threat of it so well. And I'm pretty sure this story is my villain origin. And whenever I reflect on the quote-unquote ease of not caring what people think, I realize a lot of it was actually born in this story. And so I wanted to take some time and come back and tell you all the story because somewhere between the Hate Ashley Club and fourth grade graduation, I discovered something that changed the way I understand the world. I discovered that the room is not the world. And we're gonna come back to that. But once you learn that lesson, it's very hard to unlearn it. So before we talk about the Hate Ashley Club, we should probably talk about why there was a hate Ashley Club. Because when we hear that phrase as adults, hopefully it sounds insane. But children are actually very efficient. Adults create passive aggression, adults create group texts, children just name the thing. We hate Ashley, therefore the hate Ashley Club. Now, part of why I laugh at this now is because I know who I was as a kid. It was very much like the way I am right now, to be honest. But I wasn't pushing kids down the stairs, I wasn't Regina George by all accounts. I wasn't secretly terrorizing the fourth grade, right? So this entire thing actually started as the Spice Girls Club, which you can imagine is a five-person club. So this started as a spice girl club, and I think someone at some point decided that everyone was going to pick which spice girl they wanted to be, and I I missed that meeting. And by the time I got there, ginger spice was who was left over. No shade to her. Um, but I'm I'm not ginger spice. So the club determined that I was going to be Ginger Spice, and knowing that little Ashley is not much different from adult Ashley, you can imagine that that wasn't going to fly. And one of many reasons that that wasn't going to fly is because though I did go to a predominantly black school, because I was in the gifted program, I was in the most multicultural class in the grade. And so in this particular friend group, I happened to be the only black girl. And giving Scary Spice to a non-black girl in a friend group where there is a black girl who is asking to be scary spice seemed particularly egregious. And if you think nine-year-old Ashley wasn't thinking on that level, she absolutely was. But that wasn't even really the crux of it, right? Fourth grade me, also like adult me said fine. The spice girls are actually very popular. We're fourth grade girls. You can find a ginger spice with the snap of a finger. So why don't I leave the club, right? I actually will take on the work of building a new spice girls club around my scary spice, and all you have to do is go find a new fifth-willing participant to be Ginger Spice, and this problem is solved. Is it not? Everyone gets what they want. And honestly, for a fourth grader, I feel like that was immensely mature. Like I thought I was being reasonable, and clearly the adults thought so too, but we'll get to that. So my solution was why don't I leave the club? Right? The spice girls are actually so popular that it's probably easier for me to find these new girls where I can play the role that I want, and everyone can play the role that they want, and they can find the new ginger spice. So let's just do that. And this is when I learned the first of many valuable lessons tucked into this experience because it turned out that the group did not actually like that solution at all. The group did not like that solution where I removed my energy from the equation. Because to the group, my energy in particular had value, as it turned out. My energy had value. Not enough to consider me in the first round of choosing, but enough value. I might argue that. That was why I was excluded, but whatever. But enough value that simply removing myself from the situation was not a good solution for the other members of the group. And in fact, I'll go one step further and say that maybe once I realized my presence had value, and maybe because I already knew it had value, I was playing this game of poker with them at all. Maybe it's a little bit of fourth grader nine-year-old petulance of hey, I want to be scary and I don't want to be ginger, but there's also a calculation of if this were just about group harmony and having someone easily slot into the ginger role, me excluding myself wouldn't be an issue here. You still need me to power this while you work to disempower at least my preferences in this dynamic, right? Just learning girl world really early. Okay, but anyway. So I was playing some game. I don't know if it was chess, but I was playing some game. But that original sin, that original breakup of the Spice Girls Club before it even really got off the ground reverberates into my adult life for many, many, many reasons. And we're gonna get into the other layers of the situation as we go, but just this right here, right? At this level, I'm already sure that you listener are identifying with either the Ashleys or the people who hate Ashleys. Maybe you're the kind of person who hears this and thinks, just do the thing that makes everything run smoothly. Just be ginger spice. But the thing is, it would move smoothly in my situation too. It would take work for all of us, but actually it would mostly just be work for me, work that I'm willing to do, to go out and find the four people. And I wasn't complaining about having to do that work. I was willing to do that work because I thought the end result was better for me and potentially everyone in this new Spice Girls group who got to be who they wanted to be and have fun in that club the way you imagine joining a club should be fun. But they didn't want to do one molecule of work to see my solution play out. So we were at an impasse. Because it turns out you do need five members for a Spice Girls Club, but you only need four members for a Hate Ashley Club, apparently. And listen, they were dedicated, they convened for maybe about a month or so before any adult stepped into the situation. And truly, if an adult hadn't stepped into the situation, they might still be at the lunch table 30 years later, who's to say? And to anyone asking out there what I was doing in that month, um, to my point about having an inherent value, I was always popular, and that is to say that I had like a core friend group, yes, but I was friendly and friends with more people than those outside of my friend group. So I that's what I was doing during lunch in that month. I was sort of strengthening other bonds, I guess you would say, um, or doing other things to buy the time and survive. I certainly wasn't spending that entire month, you know, sort of crying on the other end of the cafeteria. And I don't want to rewrite history. I don't know exactly what my emotional reality was at the time, but this story still stands despite whatever that may have been because of what happens once an adult steps in, right? So eventually my teacher finds out, right? And he could have punished them. He could have called everybody's parents. Honestly, he could have pretended to not even notice. Instead, he did something that I think is much stranger, but that I'm grateful for today. Every day at lunch, for about a week and a half, we all had to eat together in his classroom. Just me, my self-proclaimed haters, and our teacher. And what I remember most is not actually what anyone said. I don't remember the arguments, I don't remember the grievances, I don't remember who was mad about what. What I remember was sitting there every day across from people who had formally organized themselves against me around disliking me. And honestly, I didn't even know if the teacher had my back. Who knew what his motivation was? Maybe he just wanted the tea. Maybe he was conducting social experiments on fourth graders. I have no idea. But I think this part matters because for a lot of people, social rejection exists mostly in imagination, right? They're afraid of it, they're trying to avoid it, but hardly ever actually sitting in it. And this isn't all of us. Some of us for real got bullied pre-internet. Okay. This, in fact, this entry is for you. This entry is for us. So here I was, literally eating lunch with my rejectors, like little real housewife in training with my teacher getting off his inner Andy Cohen. And the strange thing is that after a while, it became less dramatic. The thing you imagine will destroy you is rarely as powerful once you're actually sitting in the room with it. The world didn't end. I didn't evaporate. Nobody exploded. We just kept talking, which sounds obvious, but I think that may have been the first time in my life I learned that social disapproval is survivable. Not pleasant, not comfortable, survivable. And somewhere in those lunch sessions, my teacher noticed something that I had no idea he was paying attention to, which is important because I certainly wasn't trying to impress him. I wasn't building a personal brand. I was a fourth grader trying to survive lunch. The school year keeps moving. All right, this is spring. We do about our week and a half. Hate Ashley Club eventually fizzes out because honestly, at this point, it's basically just detention, right? Like a huge congratulations, you played yourself. So life returns to normal. Graduation is approaching, and one day the teacher pulls me aside and he tells me that he's recommended me to be the graduation valedictorian. Now remember, I am in the gifted program, right? So academically, I had kind of already reached the threshold of being eligible for a valedictorian role. Technically, anyone in my class could have been the valedictorian for the grade, right? I just want to say that as a baseline. Um, okay. So academically speaking, there were plenty of kids who could have done it. So he told me that the reason he recommended me wasn't because of my grades or my test scores. It wasn't because he felt sorry for me with the Hate Ashley Club of it all. It was because of what I was saying during those launches. The conversations, the way I thought, the way I reasoned, the way I carried myself, the way I engaged with people who disagreed with me, the way I had actually presented a solution to the problem, which highlighted the real problem and the real lesson. My presence had a value that no one could deny, but no one would acknowledge either. I saw me. I assessed my value to the group and the group's value to me. I presented a solution that wouldn't collapse their plans for a club, and I survived at least a month of organized opposition. And this man said, put that girl on a stage. And I remember being completely stunned because until that moment, I thought the story was about surviving being disliked. But apparently, somebody else had been watching an entirely different story. The girls in the Hate Ashley Club were evaluating one thing. They were evaluating how much of myself I could trade to belong. My teacher was evaluating something different. And that's the moment that this memory permanently lodged something in my brain. The same behavior that was costing me social points was earning me credibility somewhere else. The same thing that got me excluded was the thing that got me selected, the thing that got me elevated. And that's why I say this is my don't give a fuck about social ostracism villain origin story. And I don't fully think I understood it then. But looking back, I think this was my first lesson in a truth that has followed me ever since. Different rooms reward different things. And sometimes the room that's rejecting you is not the room that matters, which became very obvious a few weeks later when I took that stage. And looking back, I don't even think that the valedictorian speech was the lesson. I think it was the confirmation of a lesson I was already starting to learn. Because around this time, around the same period of my life, something else was happening. And if you've listened to the entry titled Come Home to Your Sovereign Self, you've heard pieces of this story before. Around this age, I was also starting to go to Take Your Daughter to Work Day. I was starting to sit in boardrooms, starting to meet executives, starting to observe power, starting to understand that adults were building entire worlds. And I think the two experiences were happening in parallel. On the one side, fourth grade social politics. On the other, the first glimpses of institutional power. And what both experiences were teaching me was the same thing. Your peers are not the sole arbiters of value. That's not an anti-peer statement, that's just reality. Because while one group of children was busy deciding I was annoying, an adult was quietly deciding I should be trusted with a microphone. Those are very different evaluations. Those are very different scoreboards. Those are very different currencies. And I think this is the period of my life where I stopped treating popularity as proof because popularity and value are not the same thing. Approval and value are not the same thing. Consensus and value are not the same thing. In fact, some of the most valuable people I've ever met were deeply polarizing. Some of the most effective people I've ever met were deeply polarizing. Some of the most visionary people I've ever met were deeply polarizing, which does not mean being polarizing makes you valuable. Important distinction. It just means popularity is a terrible measurement tool. And somewhere around nine years old, I started realizing there were bigger games being played than whether five girls liked me at lunch. Looking back, I think that's why this memory stuck. Because it wasn't teaching me how to survive rejection, though I did learn that. Actually, it kind of sounds like I learned that before this incident, but it was teaching me how to evaluate myself using a different scoreboard. And maybe more importantly, it was teaching me that the room is not the world. The girls in the Hate Ashley Club thought they were delivering a verdict. My teacher revealed they were delivering an opinion. Those are very different things. And once you realize that, everything changes. And honestly, I think that's the real reason that I'm telling this story. Not because I was valedictorian, not because the Hate Ashley Club is funny. Although it is objectively hilarious in hindsight, I guess, but it's because when I look back at this memory now, I can see the beginning of a lesson that has followed me for the rest of my life. Not a lesson about popularity, not a lesson about authenticity, a lesson about perspective. Because what I walked away with wasn't simply the prize is worth more than the price. What I walked away with was an understanding of what the prize actually is. And when I say the prize was worth more than the price, the prize being the social cost, right? The prize being valedictorian. And the prize actually wasn't the speech, it wasn't the recognition, it wasn't being right, quote unquote, in the eyes of the adults. The prize was discovering that the room is not the world, that the people closest to you are not necessarily the final authority on your value, that social consequences are real, but they are not the entire equation. And once you've seen that happen once, you can never fully unsee it because every future situation is to look different. Every rejection, exclusion, disagreement, every room where people decide who you are. You start asking a different question. Is this the world or is this just a room? Because those are not the same thing. And I think a lot of people spend their lives trying to prove their value to rooms that have already made up their minds, not realizing that there are entirely different rooms evaluating entirely different things. The Hate Ashley Club thought the game was social approval. My teacher thought the game was leadership. Those are very different games. And if I'm being honest, I think a lot of adulthood is learning which games are actually worth playing. We talked about this in the uh sometimes people are being weird episode. Honestly, a lot of these things are in those early entries. But I just wanted to give the origin story of how it seems now that I'm able to navigate these dynamics with an ease um that most people don't naturally have when faced with the threat of being ostracized. So I'll leave you with this. What's your hate, Ashley Club? What's your villain origin story?

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Let me know. We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.