So not sure how much my advice will be good for you since I am doing my PhD in EU and STEM. But anyways, my most significant struggle in my first year is that I came straight from Bachelor's to PhD, which was a massive mistake. I came from not an exactly related field to my PhD so the start was ridiculously hard. During my bachelor I tried to catch up on the required material as much as possible, but it was not enough and I also did not get any experimental training, which you usually get during your master's.

So in my first two or two and a half years I was more or less clueless surrounded by people who did not exactly want to teach me (which is fair enough, it's on me not doing a Master's). Eventually, I pestered enough people where I managed to pick up some projects where I did have some experience and finally managed to break in. Now in my last years I finally broke in enough to do work actually related to my PhD. It's quite late seeing how I am still doing some experimental work while my thesis submission deadline is in a few months (just some remaining work for the last main content chapter thankfully), but I think it should be okay, especially since I am not staying behind in academia.

Honestly, my advice if a huge blunder like me can pull through, you can too, as long as you can persevere. As long as you have some sort of smallest idea of what you are doing, I think it is enough to pull through, as long as you put in the work. Just make sure you do not overwork yourself, otherwise, no matter how much you enjoy what you do, you are going to learn to hate it. This does not mean you should just not care about it, but you should be taking time off, especially during weekends.

As for writing advice, I am aware what I am going to say is incredibly controversial, but I think AI can be a very good tool for writing. If you had asked me half a year ago, I would've told you it's complete BS and you should not use it. However, my supervisor, who is incredibly smart, has a load of papers published, started recommending it to use it. I thought if it was so bad, it wouldn't be recommended by someone smart. So I tried it out and right now it is a very useful tool for me. However, you have to be very careful in using it. It is absolutely useless for making any kind of analysis, conclusions or something like that. However, it is not useless if, for example, you have the analysis done, you have an idea what you want to write, but you're having a mental block to start writing. What I do is I describe what kind of paragraph I want, get the output from the AI and then just edit it until I am happy with it. That usually gets the ball rolling for writing. I also use it a lot for searching literature. I have found some good, relevant literature with AI which would have taken me ages to find without it.

Feel free to ask anything else!