Episode 1 Meet and Greet

The speaker introduces herself as Megan and explains that she is starting a podcast called "Life with the Clerks." She shares some personal details about her life, including her marriage to her husband Albert and their five children. She mentions that they currently live in a camper due to some hardships they have faced, including losing their house to Hurricane Laura. Megan also talks about her career as a registered nurse and her struggles with self-doubt and negative self-talk. She expresses her desire to share her story to help other women going through difficult times. Megan emphasizes the importance of finding the good in each day and living with honesty and accountability. She ends the podcast by encouraging listeners to connect with her on social media and expressing her gratitude for starting the podcast. Have you ever wondered if you were the only woman going through difficult times, having marital problems? Do you feel insufficient as a mother? Are you absolutely miserable at work or feel like your home is less than Pinterest worthy? Well my friend, I am here to let you know that you are not alone. My goal in this season is to resonate with you on a level that you know I know and I understand what you're going through. God created us especially for this season and I promise you nothing will be wasted. I can't wait to talk with you. Oh and one thing first as a full disclaimer, sometimes I journey off topic for things that may not be appropriate for little ears. Not always, but just in case, grab a set of headphones. I'm Megan and this is Life with the Clerks Podcast. I'm so happy you're here. Okay, we're just going to jump right in this. I just texted my husband and I said I'm trying to record my first podcast and he said, good luck babe. Just remember it's talking and you can do it. So I wanted to be totally transparent. I'm sitting in my closet in our camper. We live in a fifth wall camper and I'm sitting in the front closet which is where all of our clothes are. So hopefully the volume does good on this. I recorded my intro at least 18 times earlier and I started getting so frustrated because I was just thinking like it's got to be perfect. It doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound good. I don't know what's going on. Next thing you know, I'm sitting under the table with blankets draped over the kitchen table and in my camping living room, camper living room and I'm sitting there trying to record this podcast. Intro, just the intro, just the first seven seconds and I'm like, okay, the whole point is going to be missed if I quit now because I was so frustrated with my computer and with everything and I couldn't get it to do right and so I had to get up. My volume actually quit working. I couldn't hear playback on anything so I didn't know what was going on. So I had to get up and get something to eat. So I got a snack and I'm back and I'm ready to talk to y'all. Now, if you're totally bored with me already, I understand, but stick around. You might be entertained at some point. I am Megan, like I said in my intro. I'm 30 something years old. I'm in my early 30s, 33. I'm married to my husband, Albert. He's a little bit older than I am. We are kind of high school sweethearts, if you want to call it that. I met Albert through MySpace, the OG internet social media. Do y'all remember Zayn girl and MySpace? So one day I was 17 years old and I get this message from this creepy grown man that says, somebody's been to the sun lately because girl, you too hot. And it was him asking me some questions and I sat at the family computer in our kitchen and I told my parents, come look at this. Like there is this guy that has messaged me. How weird is this? Well, turns out he knew one of my mutual friends who was dating one of his friends. And finally, we had seen each other two times. He had actually seen me twice. I saw him once in public. And I was just in high school. He was 21 years old. I was 17. My parents are absolutely insane for letting us become boyfriend and girlfriend. Sorry, mom and daddy, if y'all are listening. Y'all know how we all feel. But anyways, so we met on MySpace. We talked for a couple, well, I ignored him. I ghosted him. I was like, no. So in September, I get another message and then we exchanged phone numbers. We talked on the phone for hours and hours and hours. And we finally met that week. But anyways, that was like 16 years ago. We've been together. We have five children. We have a 12-year-old Cooper, seven, no, eight-year-old Miller, six-year-old Oliver. He'll be seven next month. And twins, Darcy and Walker, that are four. We live in a camper, like I said, right now. It's a fifth-wheel camper. This is our fourth camper in two years since Hurricane Laura. We have a very complex story. And when I say that we've gone from just one hard season to the next, I promise you I'm not even lying. We've just never really had it easy. As much as we wanted to, as much as we tried to find the easy button, we just haven't pinpointed it. And if I'm being honest, my husband and I are both still very selfish people, and we are very hard-headed, and we want our way, and when we don't get our way, we kind of butt heads on things. So whenever he started a new job about ten or so years ago, and he started traveling, and I really wanted to travel with him. And he was like, no, don't right now, because we had never ñ we're from Mississippi, and we had never left Mississippi except for like a couple day-long vacation. So he left, and finally I convinced him that I could come too. And that was the beginning of our travels. That landed us in a camper in 2016. We had our first camper, and then we sold it and did a rental, and then we bought a house. We lost the house to Hurricane Laura. We have had so many ups and downs. It's unreal. It's unreal. So a little bit about me. I am a registered nurse by trade. I went to nursing school right out of college, got pregnant and had a baby right in the middle of nursing school. That's where Cooper come from. And Cooper has kind of grown up with me. He's 12. I'm 33. I had him at 20. And we've just really grown up together. It's been really interesting to see how my parenting changes for each child. And I've worked a bunch of different places. I kind of flip-flopped. I said I was a gypsy of nursing, but really I'm a gypsy at a lot of things because I'm just not very consistent. I'm not ñ I'm scared of commitment, I guess you can say. Albert actually asked me to marry him two or three times before finally we, like, would say yes. And then I would be, like, anxious and didn't want to do it, and I was scared to death. And I would be like, you know what, I'm not marrying you. But then we had a baby. And Cooper was a year and a month old. I finished nursing school, and Albert and I looked at the courthouse, actually. So we went to the courthouse. And not until anybody we were going because we knew that there was going to be resistance from our families because our relationship was rocky from the beginning. And we've grown and matured over the years, but, oh, we can still hold our own when it comes to a disagreement. So you'll hear a lot about that in the future. Sorry, baby, if I embarrass you. Just let me know when too much is too much. I have a really hard time gauging when too much is enough. But, anyways, yeah, so we're in a camper. If you hear the air condition, it's because it cuts on, like, loud very often. And I just – I worked at a doctor's office before moving back into the camper in May of this year, and I had a coworker that would just say, you know what, Megan, you need to write a book. You need to write a book. And I thought, that is a great idea. So you know what I did? I have started, like, five books. I've started them. I've got them typed up. They're in documents, and I'm going to end up reading them as podcasts because I'm so inconsistent at getting things down on paper and out of my brain. But, honestly, I've been having a podcast in my head for about three or four years now. I just sit and talk to myself, and I'm like, if I had a podcast, I would say this or I would say that. And I really have wanted to do this, and I told myself I was going to start a podcast before the end of 2022. And every single time I wanted to do it, I would chicken out, and I would back out at it because I'm really good at quitting. I need an easy button. I don't like doing hard things. I don't like leaving my comfort zone. I enjoy my tiny 380-square-foot house. I don't like leaving it. And as much as I wanted to make a podcast, every single time I just felt like I was putting myself all the way out in the open, and I just couldn't handle that. I couldn't deal with it. And then I would say I wasn't smart enough. You're not smart enough to figure this out. Like, all these people that you listen to, they have people behind the scenes working for them and helping them figure it out, and you're not smart enough for that. And honestly, those were all lies. I was telling myself one lie after the next. And I might even get a little teary-eyed. As I was sitting there recording my intro the 18 times, I would get teary-eyed as soon as I got to the end because I'm like, it's here. Like, I finally am doing what I've told myself I was going to do for so long. And one podcast after the next after the next, I'm going to get better. I'm not going to be great at this. The first one's going to probably be really, really terrible. And I'm okay with that. I'm fine with that now. I wasn't about 30 minutes ago. I tried to talk myself out of it. I tried to convince myself that I wasn't going to be good enough and it wasn't going to go on and be right and it wasn't going to be good. But I am recording, and I'm doing great. I'm proud of myself. I feel very energetic. If somebody comes up outside of my camera, they're going to hear me sitting here talking to myself. But like Albert said, it's just talking. And I'm so good at talking. I'm so good at talking and encouraging others and building others up and being like optimist and optimist. What's that word? Like I'm just optimistic for others. But when it comes to myself, I'm so negative, and I'm so down, and I put myself down, and I'm learning that these are lies of the enemy. These are not who God created me to be or what God created me to be. And I also think that that's why it's been so hard for me to start this podcast because I have a lot of things that I want to say. And a lot of these things are going to really, really aggravate the enemy. And we are at spiritual warfare right now in our country and in our own homes. Like you say, there's wars going on, and there's all these big things going on, and I'm not going to touch on that. But if we just look inside our homes, we will see that there is stuff going on that nobody knows about. And I have a huge trial that I'm walking through right now, and our whole family is walking through right now, if you notice, in real life. Like we are going through some heavy, heavy stuff, and it's not fun, and I don't want to talk about it. But guess what, if it helps one of you women, mamas, sisters, friends, if it helps y'all to get through to the next day, then I need to share my story. I need to share all of the stories because this is hard. Life is so hard. And I haven't been able to make it without my tribe, my people. And since we've been moving, it's hard to create that community where you have people that you can come to and just hang out and go to their house and sit down. And I have friends that would say, Megan, you're crazy. You can come sit at my house anytime. And I get that. But we have to step out and do it. We can't just sit and put ourselves in a corner or put ourselves in a box or hold ourselves up in our bedroom. We have to get out there and do it. And I just want to share part of my story as we go. Let me look. I made some notes because I'm like, this is going to be so bad. I don't know. I guess I've already gotten through all my notes. I've just gotten to a point in my life where even on my worst days, I'm trying to find the good. I want to be honest because what is life without honesty? I don't always go to bed on a positive note. I yell and scream at my children, and they still come and give me a hug and tell me they love me and they want goodnight hugs. We do five Mississippis is what we call it. And I can give them five Mississippis, but I can still be angry that they messed up something or that they destroyed their bedroom and wouldn't clean it up. Or I could be mad at my husband for whatever reason. Or I could be mad at, you know, anything. And I can go to bed on my anger, and I don't want to live life like that anymore. So I'm kind of doing this as an accountability. I've picked up a lot of habits and tips that I feel like will help me, and I feel compelled to share with you. And I'm just really happy to be here. Like, you have no idea how happy I am to be here making this podcast. I had a blog a long time ago. I thought about starting a blog back again. I really don't think I'm going to. I did, actually, on Wix, but it's just a generic Wix blog page right now. But if you want to connect with me, come find me on Facebook at Life With The Clarks or Instagram at Life With The Clarks. And I'm also working on a Patreon account if you would like to maybe try to find me on there in the future. I'm just so happy, so happy that we're here, that I made it, that I decided to be brave and do something so big that has been weighing on my heart for so long. And I'm probably going to cry a whole lot because I've become a softie in my old age. I just feel very passionate about resonating with other women and connecting on a level that you know you're not alone because I know what it feels like to be alone. Don't we all, since 2020, we all know a touch of how it feels to be alone. And I just want you to know you're not alone in this season and you are seen. And the feelings that you feel matter and you are loved and it's going to be okay. We're going to take it one day at a time. And we're just going to smile through it because smiling uses less muscles than screaming. And that's the saying I think. Anyways, leave a comment or a review or whatever. Share with your friends that Megan is on a podcast. Yeah buddy. Like Dorsey says, oh bruh. Like bruh, I made a podcast. I did it. I did the thing. The thing that I was most scared to do. And I'm just so thankful. Y'all, you really have to do this. Happy Weekend after Thanksgiving and I will talk to y'all later. Okay. I love y'all. Bye-bye now. ♪♪♪♪♪♪