Hello and welcome to Second Thoughts!
I am Sophie Hayssen, cruise director and author of this newsletter. For the past several years I’ve been a freelance writer for places like Teen Vogue, Refinery29, and BUST Magazine— an occupation which has brought me profound joy and anxiety.
On my worst days, I felt like a Mary Kay saleswoman but for article ideas, going from publication to publication, hawking my wares.
From the start, pitching has always been my least favorite part of the job. It’s weird to have to ask others for permission to do something you genuinely love, especially when you are already psyched to hit the ground running. That’s why I wanted to start Second Thoughts as a place to write whatever I want whenever I want and to fill in the lulls in work that every freelance journalist has had to endure.
I can promise you that the content of this newsletter will be varied, probably posted sporadically, and definitely written in the wee hours of the morning. However, I can also promise that this newsletter will never be a graveyard of ‘Stories Sophie Is Too Lazy To Pitch.’ Quite the contrary! The stuff I have planned for this newsletter are things I’ve been thinking about for ages, unique trends and phenomena I couldn’t release from my mind despite my best efforts.
My hope is that this newsletter will give me time—a rare commodity in the journalism world. Time to flesh out a thesis. Time to look at an issue from every possible angle. Time to read. Time to figure out what it is exactly I want to say and the best way possible for me to say it. It’s precisely the reason I named the newsletter Second Thoughts. So if you’re ready for slow-roasted ideas and ice cold takes, subscribe and I’ll see you for the (forthcoming) debut post.
xoxo. Sophie