Five years ago (and some change — I missed this post by a week or two), I signed up for a Twitter account with only a vague idea of what I was supposed to do with it. At first, I was @meghanfrick. I lost it a few months later when I stupidly changed my handle to a nickname.

At the time, I didn’t have a smartphone, so all my updates were sent via desktop or SMS on my brick of a phone. I tweeted about my classes. Skipping classes. Meetings of clubs. That summer, I got sick and tweeted pictures of the view from my hospital bed — the artist Blue Sky’s Tunnel Vision.

Since then, Twitter has made me better at what I do. Even though “what I do” has changed. People in one camp will never stop making jokes about people tweeting what they eat for breakfast. People in the other will probably never stop writing out long manifestos contradicting them. I don’t really have any desire to add to that particular flow of Internet words.

I will say that I’ve sent tweets from the Democratic National Convention, from small town festivals in North Carolina, from beaches, from trains, from conferences, from a million K-12 classrooms and a thousand brainstorming sessions. I have made dozens of real friends. I have gotten three jobs and made a career largely out of pushing characters on this app I’d never heard of five years ago, when I punched in details sitting on a hill by Walker Hall at Appalachian State.

I have also tweeted, more than once, about what I was having for lunch.

It’s been a great five years of both.