What Sophie Said

I’ve started a new thing over the past few months: replying to emails. I don’t mean work emails or emails from family – I of course already replied to those ones. I mean email newsletters. I’m signed up to the newsletters of a fair amount of writers and bloggers, all of whom write content I absolutely love to receive. They’re newsletters that I get excited about opening when they land in my inbox. A couple of months ago, I realised they’d never know how much I loved these letters to my inbox, emails which feel like they’re written only to me, unless I told them. So I told them. Laura Jane Williams wrote a good few months ago about a feeling of not being good enough. I can’t remember then context exactly but she’d realised this feeling and had chosen to approach those feelings differently. In a relatively short email, she had summed up all the emotions I had been feeling that same week: nerves, excitement, mixed together with a feeling of ‘who cares, anyway?’ ...

My name is Sophie, and I buy FAR too many magazines. That would have been my confession just six months ago. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the world of magazines. The glossy covers, the beautiful images, that mixture of beauty, fashion, life and advice. Monthly magazines, gossipy weekly magazines, it didn’t matter. I loved them, one and all. Looking back at the amount of money I must have spent on magazines over the years actually now makes me shudder. When you consider your average glossy monthly is around the £4, and I loved far more than one of them… Then, about six months ago, I graduated from university and ‘real life’ begun. I moved back home whilst job hunting, and began work in September of 2013. I realised more than ever that I needed to watch my pennies. Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot about budgeting at university, but it took starting work and earning an actual salary to really make me think. Flicking through the November issue of a popula...