Ten years ago* my friend, Emily, and I hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and she took what is probably my favorite picture of me ever taken.

The picture’s kind of pretentious (check out that fedora!!), but it’s the exact right vibe for social media: “I’m in a cool place, looking kickass, doing something fun”.

But this picture also spurs great memories for me. Emily is one of my oldest friends– we met the first day of grad school**. A few years later she helped get me a job at the place she was working. The day I started, she and I decided to start a “Machu Picchu” fund. Each of us would put back $100/month from our paychecks and when we had enough money, we would go. It took four years, but we got there!

Now ten years on from that trip, I’m in a very different stage of life. And while I still very much want my profile picture to exude the “I’m in a cool place, looking kickass, doing something fun” vibe, nowadays that’s less “Machu Picchu, wearing a fedora, exploring ruins” and more “my house, with messy hair, writing a blog post”.

Enjoy the quick selfie I just took that’s my new profile picture. Here’s hoping it won’t be ten more years before I get another one.

*I had grand plans to do this ten years to the day (June 3, 2022), but got busy doing something

**She was wearing a “right to bear arms” shirt (a shirt that featured a person who possessed literal bear-the-animal arms)