Welcome to the Megan Kelly show, your home for Open, Honest, and Provocative Conversations.

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show. It is the very last show of 2022.

And we wanted to bring you some of the highlights of this past year. So much goodness to choose from, and we are so grateful that you were there for it all.

But with more than 200 episodes this year alone and 400 interviews, it is so hard. It's hard to do a best of show. Right? It's like, who do you exclude?

There's so much goodness in any event. So we're not going to say this is like the best ever because these people are amazing, but there were many others we could have used, but there's time is limited.

So we are going to bring you some of six interviews over the past year that give you a flavor of flavor of some of what the Megan Kelly show is all about. A little sampling of what we do here and will continue to do in 2023.

Gotta start with our pal Bridget. Fetices return to the show in episode 402. I feel like this maybe the second year in the row she's made like end of year highlight real. That's a credit to bridge.

When Bridget was first on the show when the Megan Kelly show was just a podcast. It was one of the most talked about interviews I did in 2020. Well, a lot has changed in Bridget's life since then. And we talked about all of it life after motherhood and much, much more.

Your piece on substack entitled I regret being a slut is as Ben said a beautiful and brave piece it really was. And something near and dear to my own heart because I've said this before on the show.

I was in a much different place than you are in our backgrounds are different of course to but we're very aligned on virtually everything now.

But the one piece of advice I give everyone's daughter going off to college is the same and it is don't be a slut. Don't be a slut. Don't give it away. So easily girls like make him earn it. Remember your value like it having sex.

You don't have to be in love, but it should be something really precious and you don't just want any Tom Dick or Harry jumping on top of you. So to speak.

You are there too, but you got there through a much more traumatic road and I will just read this this one piece of your of your amazing substack piece to our audience.

You write if I get really honest with myself, I'd say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized and worthless.

I wouldn't have said that at the time though. At the time I would have told you I was liberated. Even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hook up did not call me back.

At the time I would have said one night stands made me feel emboldened. But in reality I was using sex like a drug. You go on the lie I told myself for decades was I'm not in pain. I'm empowered.

Wow. So how did you come to that really realization like how did you spend so much time in that dark place was it sobriety did that behavior continue after like what was it?

It was a lot of sobriety and a lot of therapy and I think yeah a lot of when I think about this I I know a lot of it is tied up with my drinking and drug use a lot of the that behavior I don't think I would have engaged in had I not been drunk or high.

And so those things are very connected. Also post sexual assault when I was pretty young 18 I really felt dirty and ashamed and I felt like it was my fault because I was drinking under age.

And I felt like I was valueless now and it wasn't it wasn't like I hadn't already lost my virginity but I had really only just lost my virginity when this happened so I was still pretty early into the into my sexuality and.

And I responded to it by being kind of hyper promiscuous which is very common for women who have experienced trauma they'll often just become hyper that they'll go into being more promiscuous and it's a way to try and take control back at least it was for me and it was also just a way of and and at the same time feeling like I had no value and ashamed and saying like oh I don't care I just don't care and.

So it's been a really I mean the emails I received from women and men and gay men since I wrote that piece I'm still getting them is it is incredible the stories people are telling me the response the I think that there was a generation Gen X older millennials and we were raised with that kind of girl power you can sleep your way to empowerment and you can.

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