Six weeks of daily mock interviews with a stranger from a Discord server and the awkwardness never fully went away, it just stopped mattering

First one was excruciating, both of us reading off prepared questions like a script neither of us wrote. By week three it was still a little stiff but I'd stopped caring, which turned out to be the actual goal. The real interviews afterward felt almost quiet by comparison — I'd already done the uncomfortable part forty-something times with a stranger who had no reason to be kind about it.