My family has never been able to escape the throes of mental illness. Along my maternal and paternal side, there is anger issues, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and likely other disorders that no one has shared with me. It has provoked generational trauma and these disorders have been passed down like family heirlooms. At the age of 20, well within my second year in college, I was formally diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder. These mental disorders, which has gone undiagnosed since I was in middle school, have seriously affected me in the way I socialize, complete tasks, and simply live my life. Socializing has never been an easy task for me to begin with. I have always felt like a background character, simply observing the life around me. It was, and still is, hard for me to have small talk with someone without feeling like I want to crawl out of my own skin. Starting in high school, I felt it getting worse. It felt like a wall would come between me and the person I wanted to talk to. Words would get stuck in my throat and no matter how hard I tried, they would not come out. In college, the anxiety seemed to reach an all-time high. I am terrified at the prospect of hanging out with someone new, even though I am pining to make friends. I still feel like a background character with even more observing features. As someone who is fairly determined, I am always one to get things on my to-do list done. With my recent diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and OCD, I realize why I have begun slowing down. Completing even the most simple things nearly drains me of energy; I find that my planner stays empty and my schoolwork goes unfinished sometimes. I can't seem to muster up the motivation to do work or chores or simply going to class. This makes me fall behind and I stress myself out even more when I attempt to catch up on things. Living day-to-day life has become profoundly difficult with my recent discovery regarding my mental health and getting older. I find myself talking about how I "feel the exhaustion in my bones," I find that I've been made more pessimistic, and that I just want to be home all the time, away from the outside world. I feel like I've been put in slow motion on some days, but not in the way of being mindful. It's more like trudging through ankle-deep mud, slow and annoying -- but I still make my way through it somehow. Mental illnesses are hard, to say the very least. There are days where I feel okay, and I can successfully complete my day at hand. Other times I wake up and all I want is for the day to shut off so I don't have to go through it. I know my struggles in finding ways to socialize, I fight with getting tasks done, and living becomes a challenge. My mental illnesses are battles that I fight through everyday, and as I reference my mud analogy again, it is slow, bothersome, and difficult, but I still find myself making my way through it each time.