Hello, I'm Michael Swaim, and welcome back to Tales from the Pit.

This is your trigger warning.

In today's episode, my guest Vanessa Griton and I discuss dating and relationships through the lens of mental illness,

specifically bipolarism, addiction, depression, and relapse.

It's even more fun than it sounds. But before the interview, a new short story written in honor of my own most recent relapse. Hope you like it. You're going to be. Serenity prayer. This story concerns a thinking animal very much like you, from a long line of thinking animals very much like you.

Where he came from, the Earth, a whole lot of things happened that didn't really concern

him or even his forebears for a very long time.

But one day, there started to be animals like him on the earth, and they started thinking

a bit, and they got it into their heads that they ought to be doing something.

So they embarked upon a lot of construction projects and a fair number of destruction projects as well.

They were like a whole bunch of ants and they stayed pretty much that way for what on the cosmic scale is a very short time indeed.

Then one day sometime later, which as I say on the cosmic scale is almost the very next day or even the next moment.

This whole mass of thinking animals invented rocketry and adjacent industries and technologies such as the O-ring and the A-bomb and other things.

And they left Earth to sort of see what was around out there.

And boy did they ever see. It took a fair while, but eventually, the

ants from Earth, who called themselves humans, bumped into a lot of other thinking animals, very much like themselves in key respects

and shockingly different in others.

There were a lot of wars and treaties and things like that, but eventually everyone in the universe pretty much knew everyone else, or were at least cordial with the creatures in their own galactic backyards.

You can imagine that took a lot of doing and a fair bit of time, and it did.

You can imagine that made for a whole lot of thinking animals, census-wise,

and a whole lot of lives, all dependent on one little universe and it did for a short time if

we're speaking on the cosmic scale on the cosmic scale you could say it was merely late afternoon on the day that humans first

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