This is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Meg Bowles, and in this show, stories of persevering, persisting, and going the distance.

The challenges we face from perilous mountains to epic battles and crushing fears. Sometimes we make it through with grace, and other times,

well, not so much. Our first story comes from Sarah Johnson, who took the stage at one of our

open mic story slams where

WNYC is a media partner of the Moss. From the bellhouse in Brooklyn, here's Sarah.

Thanks. When I was eight years old, I had a nanopupy. You guys know what that is? It's like a tomogachi. It's a little plastic egg toy with a screen and three buttons, and you have to, it's like an electronic pet.

It's like a dog or an alien or whatever.

And you have to feed it and bathe it and play with it and put it to sleep and basically keep alive this little pixelated dog-shaped blob,

you know. And it was super fun, man, I gotta tell you. And I was eight years old and me and

NANOPPUPY are just having a blast, okay? And I take, we go everywhere together, he's my best friend,

I hook him on to my little belt loop on my jeans and I walk around and he like, bounce

his, I love him.

But I started to notice after like two weeks, every time I need to do something like human,

eight-year-old related, like sleep or go to school,

nanopopo-pupy dies of neglect.

And like the guilt and the devastation and the humiliation that I feel as an eight-year-old is frankly inappropriate.

Like, it's like anxiety through the roof, right?

So I make it my like life's mission to keep this generation of nanopupy alive.

And it turns out that is a 24-hour day job.

Because every time it gets hungry or sleepy, it beeps. So it's like all night, all whatever, it's just beeping at me. And my parents are starting to notice that I am not sleeping well. I am, I'm like telling my friends that I'm sick, so I don't have to like go outside and play with them. So I'm like take care of

nanopopy. And I'm lying to my teacher. I'm basically telling my teacher I got to go pee

...