Would You Just... Take Charge?

A bad night. My anxiety has spiked massively and I am unable to finish the post I have been working on. I keep rewriting the same two paragraphs trying to get them to lead onwards, but nothing is happening. It's like hitting a brick wall. Like rubbing rocks together and getting no spark. Nothing is flowing. And I'm aware how close that is to mixing metaphors, but I'm doing my best here.

The old voice is back, the one that criticises everything, finds everything I do revolting -- retreated into the background for a while but just biding its time, now thinks it sees an opportunity. "You've run out of words, you've said everything you have to say, you've lost it, you'll never write anything good again."

"Hang on, so you're saying I wrote something good before?"

"No, didn't say that."

"You at least implied it"

"Well, no, personally I think it was all crap, but some people seemed to like it, easily fooled I guess, or lying perhaps. But it doesn't matter, you spent all last night and all today stressing and tugging at your beard and staring at the blank screen and feeling pulled down by the weight that you hoped had gone but was just momentarily pushed away, and you scrolled and scrolled on your phone and watched rubbish on Netflix to which you couldn't even pay attention and you felt the panic slowly rising, and now another day is done and you have nothing to show for it, longest time now between posts since starting this regular thing, and it'll be even harder tomorrow, and even harder the day after that, and the stress is going to build and you'll be too weak to face it and you'll have to go back to quitting and getting drunk and staying safe and secure and wretched as you've been for so long, and--"

"--Or I could just write this."

"What? Just this? Don't be ridiculous. It'll be awful. It'll be worthless. Everyone will laugh at you. Everyone who thinks you can write will see what a joke it all was."

"OK."

"That's it, give up. It was a nice idea, but we both know it had run its course. It's so much easier the old way."

"No, sorry, I mean: OK that this will be awful. OK that it's all I can manage. Big deal. I'll take that, I reckon, over ever listening to you again. I'll take writing dumb, meandering, scrappy posts day after day after day, until you finally get the message that however ugly I look, however dumb it comes out, I am in charge now. You are not in control any longer. You hold no sway. This is my life. This is my life. This is my life."

And the voice subsides again, at least for one more night...