Hello everybody!
Translate to your language by selecting from the box~:
USA250 Journal Project
Personal Chronicle: July 4, 2025 – July 5, 2026
A gift for reflection. A record of now. A story for what’s next.
✍️ “Who am I?”
I’m Annie Sullivan. Twenty-two.
Portland, Oregon. Waitress by necessity. Artist by accident. Ghost by choice.
I exist in fragments:
6 a.m. espresso shots at Spindle
2 a.m. dog walks after The Hollow
Sketches on napkins, knees curled on my twin mattress, Spotify low, grief loud
I’m the girl who dropped out, moved back, swallowed her dreams and called it “being realistic.”
I’m the youngest of three, the softest of us all, and the one most determined not to disappear.
I draw what I can’t say.
I post what I can’t sign.
I live in a rented room with thrift-store curtains and a drawer full of bills.
Shay says I need to stop hiding.
Mr. Reilly says I already shine.
But mostly I just want to be known without being looked at too hard.
Who am I?
I’m a sketch of a waitress in a superhero cape.
I’m a mixtape made of unpaid internships, rent receipts, and late-night poems.
I’m still here.
“How did I get here?”
I got here on a Greyhound bus with $87, a busted sketchbook, and too much shame to call it what it was: coming home.
I made it one year in Seattle—art school, three jobs, four roommates, fifteen skipped meals, and one nervous breakdown in a stairwell with vending machine coffee. I dropped out before finals. Couldn’t afford to stay. Couldn’t afford to breathe.
I moved back to Portland thinking it would feel like healing. It didn’t. Just familiar.
Now I live in a house with musicians who practice at midnight and a law student who sleepwalks to the fridge. I waitress at two places. I draw on everything but the “right” materials. I sell nothing. I still owe $14,231 in federal loans.
But I make things. Still. Somehow.
I started a comic called Ghost Diner just to survive the silence between shifts. I post anonymously. It’s about a waitress who serves ghosts and forgets she’s one of them.
It’s the first thing I’ve made that people care about.
Someone left a comment that just said, “I feel seen.”
I got here by giving up on one version of myself and drawing my way toward another.
What has life taught me?
That art can live inside the cracks.
That surviving is an act of rebellion.
And that sometimes, staying soft is the revolution.
Family, Friends & Associates
Kim Sullivan – Mother.
Shay – Friend and roommate.
Mr. Reilly – Diner regular and friend.
