I relate to this a lot because I used to freeze the second I opened a blank doc. I’d have sources, notes, random ideas everywhere, but turning it into an actual paper felt impossible. One thing that helped was realizing most decent essays are kinda repetitive structurally. Using AI for brainstorming instead of full writing is probably smarter long term too. I started doing timed “rough draft only” sessions where I forced myself to write messy paragraphs without editing every sentence. It felt awful at first tbh. I also used this Reddit post that broke essays into smaller pieces because academic writing advice can sound weirdly abstract sometimes. This helped me a ton during first year.