It was good! I'm surprised to hear that this was your first piece of short fiction! As a writer I'm inexperienced, but as a reader I thought the dialogue felt pretty naturalistic and well-paced. And I too liked the bat's tendency to interrupt Dwarkesh, lol

Six months ago I read this and thought, "Yeah, this is obviously true of me."

For example, a thing I'd do is ruminate for days on a difficult conversation I needed to have, in order to devise a way to deliver the information while causing the other person the least pain — but that's not always possible. If, for instance, I need to break up with someone, there's no way for me to guarantee they will not be hurt. By breaking up with someone, I am *by nature* inflicting a painful experience on them! The information itself is painful! The task is impossible, but at no point would I stop and allow myself to live with this.

So, I started making quite a few changes towards being more honest/straightforward with people, and found my anxiety to be greatly reduced pretty much immediately. There were confounding factors which made it hard to tell whether this is the change primarily responsible for my lessened anxiety (and I'm also no stranger to flaky breakthroughs) so I sat on this for a while before proclaiming success.

Six months later, I'm still pretty much anxiety free. So I guess the changes can be considered a success? I do continue to catch myself trying to control people's thoughts sometimes, but when I do, I just course correct. (Usually, I course correct by telling the person what the thoughts in my head are)

With that said, thanks! Your post helped me. :)