There's a small, cold circle of steel being pushed hard into the middle of my forehead.
He's got my head rocked back.
I'm having to look down to meet him in the eye.
"Listen lady..."
He's cocking the gun.
"I ain't no patient man. I don't have the graceagod to live eternal"
"I'm a ask you summin'.... then I'm a countathree. Understan?"
I don't. move. an. eyelid.
"You wanna do summin' with the gaddamnpen!?"
....aaaand....cut.
It's a wrap!
I think you need to cut out all the negative thinking and dwelling on the past, who you think you were and what you thought you could do. It's gone, it's in the past and I think it's holding you up.
Fear is holding you up. The brilliant front-runner Steve Prefontaine said "Don't let fear make a coward of you." I'm paraphrasing/misquoting him for context.
The brain-fog aside - it's a real thing and a problem but the way I'm also looking at your situation is that you are out of practice with the way in which you move into a flow state - that's where you can barely get the ideas down on the page fast enough because they are coming to you so quickly. This is a holy grail experience for anyone and everyone that writes or does anything creative.
It seems like you are judging and editing what you have written far too soon... two steps forward and one back: that's no way to go about it - you'll never get many words down on the page if that's what you're doing - you'll never get into the next field to start growing those ideas you've been carrying around in your pockets. I'd aim to write 1500-2500 words minimum, possibly as much as 4,500 words (but you can work your way up to that) before you start looking back and interrupting your own flow, because that's what you are doing. I'll give reasons for those numbers in a moment. Better to look at your word count than what you've written.
It's never easy in the first instance and probably for you now, it'll be harder because you are out of practice. There's one thing that has helped me and it'll perhaps seem unusual but I'll explain why: it's writing letters on a penpal site (which has many other benefits).
When was the last time you were so absorbed in writing that you lost track of time? I get this almost every day writing letters - the truth is it's not every single day but I am very accustomed to slipping into that feeling really easily once I start writing. We're are all different - I don't believe in writer's block - I simply don't think that way - writing is a problem - you need creative solutions - they exist - plenty exist - you just have to find the ones that appeal to you. I don't throw up my hands when I'm stuck on a crossword thinking it's writers block - it's just a riddle, a problem that just needs a bit of invention or lateral thinking to solve.
When I'm writing a reply I'm responding to the letter I've been sent but also flowering off into tangents. I learned a lot from reading Sylvia Plath's diaries for instance and by reading the diaries, letters and interviews (in particular) with many other writers, musicians and artists. I found the free-flowing style of what these people say when speaking off the cuff or privately in diaries so inspiring - and it's not just the content but the way in which they pour out their ideas, unhindered and especially when they conjure up so many magical figures of speech. I take this mode of self expression - this spontaneous, unselfconscious, ambitious approach - as a model for how I try to write. So I find that in writing letters, I get a lot of regular practice at entering that flow state and - exactly as I've seen in Paths diaries, letter writing is an opportunity to be inventive, fearless, playful, unselfconscious - I approach every piece of writing I do with this in mind and that includes shopping lists, posts on forums, emails, WhatsApp/Messenger messages - anything and everything - it's all an opportunity to practice... so do it. A few lines back I wrote about "flowering off at tangents" and I was conscious of writing that but I was also aware, as I had mentioned Plath, of her use of the word "flower" that stuck in my mind the first time I read it years ago and it came instantly to my mind (for reasons I don't need to know or understand)... let me dig the quote out...
"When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies."
So I know my reading feeds into the reservoir of language and ideas I can draw on so don't skimp on your reading thinking that it's time that subtracts from writing - done the right way - it's the opposite. Right at the start of this post, (I have no idea why), I wrote something in a way that maybe readers of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian might recognise.
So I have found that in my letter writing I can write 1500-2500 words pretty easily before I start thinking - where am I going, where have I been - but I can push that out to about 4,500 if I turn off all my internal alarms and insecurities. Let me just count what I've done so far... about 700 words. It doesn't take long to knock that out if you are in a flow state - you can't do that if you are stopping to check on what you've written all the time - well - I never could.
It's not uncommon at all, that the brilliant ideas you have in your head look so dead on the page - that's when your inventiveness and creativity come in - you've got to breath life into it and believe that you have what it takes to do that but you've got to get some writing down on the page first.
You'll probably ignore everything I've said so far and see the last thing I'm going to say as the magic bullet (*) you (perhaps didn't know you) were looking for!
My daughters bought me a full annual subscription to the BBC Maestro app. Go and check it out. I haven't started using it yet. hth
(*) - there are none! Don't bother looking for them!
PS The penpal app I use is called Slowly.