Transcending the Tumblr era: Amelia Opens up on her Creation of Sotce
I Talked to my Friend Amelia on how she Turned Tumblr Nostalgia into a Business through her Alias sotce, and the Upkeep that is Required from Her
Hi, my name is Sawyer, and I was not a cool Tumblr girl in 2014. I don’t know how to make a meme. I didn’t steal from American Apparel. I never played around with a film camera or dated an older man in a Lana Del Rey way. I never got pulled into that underbelly of true teenage online expression. I never bathed in digital anonymity through a kitty mask, intentionally ambiguous media, or a pseudonym. Enter sotce, minus the kitty mask.
I witnessed sotce the way most people witness her, from afar, through her witty Tiktoks, set always to non-trending music. When she would pop up on my Tiktok FYP, she would transform into my old friend Shannon. Back in the 2010s, Shannon would gawk at my inability to grasp the secret language of Tumblr. She would laugh when I would use uppercase letters. She would try to help me understand, but mostly, when I was around her, I felt like a grandpa, an alien to my own generation.
Thus, sotce seemed unapproachable to me. She seemed to be in a deep relationship with the internet, like my (apparently triggering) old friend. Sotce seemed like someone who would laugh at my uppercase letters, at my red heart emojis, my use of commas. But at our first meeting, her candor suggested otherwise, it suggested respect, a kind of openness to my advice that I typically find quite rare as a manager. She wasn’t Shannon. I wasn’t in high school anymore.
Most of my friends who were a part of Tumblr culture, including Shannon, ended up at boring jobs in marketing or startups with rancid office culture. But sotce seemed to have found a way to transcend the normal path, rising like a Phoenix from the burnt ashes of 2014. She wasn’t a time capsule though, she was doing it here and now, pulling at our heart strings in real time. She had turned that dark ambiguous part of the internet into a business, something only achievable by a ten year stint of sunbathing in the joys of digital ambiguity.
She had turned those who were nostalgic for the Tumblr-era into a united community. She had made her cryptic memes, drawings, writing, videos, and audio recordings all profitable through her Patreon, softly promoted by even more cryptic and extremely niche social media posts. After our first meeting, I was hooked. I had to work with this mysteriously famous, wonderfully brilliant artist/writer/meme god. Besides, I knew the crusty male agents out there would never understand her.
Sotce’s legal name is Amelia. When I learned this through our first wire transfer, I asked her to define the two. Who is sotce? Who is Amelia?
“sotce is a perfect ego and amelia is a regular human girl who knows how to try her on really well. i think amelia’s personality pops out sometimes, and that grounds sotce in the world. it is an ongoing dance, a push and pull between being human and being holy.”
Rereading her answer, I am stunned at its simplicity. It reminds me much of her private blog, where she answers subscribers’ questions on a near daily basis. Sometimes her answers are essay-length, sometimes her answer is a yarn emoji.
Thousands of questions and thousands of sotce’s accompanying answers lie within her private diary, which at most times, feels more intimate than reviewing a client’s porn (I should mention that the majority of my client list is online sex workers).
I struggled writing this interview for an embarrassing amount of time because I felt that every question I had for her was everything short of revolutionary, and her answers would feel perhaps fatigued. There would be nothing more profound that I could ask her than the questions that were already asked by her fans, every day on her private Tumblr. There would be no answer she could give me that could provide as much hope, love, and empathy than what was always staring right at me. What do you ask a woman when you have already read her diary?
The preceding questions may feel a bit annoying to you, hounding, overdone. I wanted the impossible so badly. I wanted her to see what I saw. I wanted her to define sotce and Amelia in a language everyone would understand. I wanted her to explain some of her ambiguity. I wanted her to appeal to the crusty agents that might give up on reading this. I wanted long answers, not an emoji.
Implying a difference between the two, I asked her if she missed the person she used to be, before she lived in an ashram, threw away her medications, ghosted the doctors that prescribed said medications, studied Buddhism, and then adopted her pseudonym. Although unsaid, I was asking if she had missed Amelia.
“i miss her because I didn’t get to know her very well before she was gone. i was a party girl, i loved going out. i had some trouble growing up. . . how blessed I am to have known that life and walk away from it. most people don’t get to walk away.”
I suppose her answer didn’t quite satiate me, so I found myself asking something similar, but posed differently.
“sotce can hold people to the light. she offers a perspective that lets problems dissolve very naturally and gently. problems can do this on their own of course, but sometimes heavy things require a conduit, a person who is willing to look at them with curiosity, with unlimited kindness.”
I wanted to get specific — What does it feel like to be sotce? What does it feel like to be looked at as a guru?
“this work is just sitting in a room slipping stuff out under the door and somehow money slips in from the other side. none of it is me exactly, i’m not super interested in myself. i’m more interested in the little god sparks that fall down and i am indebted to share them when i see them. it’s like that quote, ‘speak or die.’
when i get a comment that’s like ‘oh sotce you’re my teacher, you’re my guide’ i’m perplexed in the same way i’m perplexed when someone comments: ‘oh sotce you look so much like my cousin!’ both lenses are fine, i’ll be your teacher, your cousin, best friend, enemy, anything you want.
speaking to this part of people is a big responsibility, one that i take very seriously. I tune in and open for those who can’t. I’m filling a point in the star.
i owe the clarity i dip into to a long line of realized gurus. they gave me that well, or showed me the way to it. i cried every night at first [living in a monastery]. i was so resistant to meditation. i was like ‘i don’t know about doing this, i don’t know if i believe in it’ and they were like ‘that’s fine, do what you want,’ and that drew me into that tradition, slowly, that patience.
sotce is a natural progression of that spiritual work, if you want to call it that–my spiritual work and my artistry and how i’m digesting those teachings and sharing them in contexts that connect to my home world. it’s nice to have something i can slip in and out of, i trust this role but some days i can’t be sotce at all. it wasn’t until i met you actually that i was like ‘oh… this is something.’ i’m sure i will follow that something for the rest of my life.”
Finally, not a yarn emoji. Something I can chew on.
So, why me? Why did it take me to see that ‘“something?” Before she met me, did she feel Amelia and sotce were inherently enmeshed? Does she relax as Amelia, or does she relax as sotce? My seemingly endless questions were met with a very simple:
“I liked your swag, I liked the way you looked on camera.”
I asked her to next describe the feeling of having an online community. Despite my tangential way of questioning, I was met with:
“for a long part of my life i told myself to keep going so that i could find the others.”
I began to crave her short answers after a while. I would giggle endearingly as she would hit me with her sharpness. She answered my interview questions in an immeasurable pattern, the same pattern she sticks to in her private blog. Some yarn, some manifestos. Both felt equally as good to receive, after a while.
I tried to transcribe some more of her lengthy answers, but every time I did, it looked wrong. It felt like a disservice. My questions paled in comparison to the intimate well that already lie within her Tumblr and Patreon.
For a long time, I was paralyzed to write this article because I felt stupid. I felt that there was no way to make the article not seem like a grandpa-granddaughter rocking chair parley. Even though I was proud to be sotce’s grandpa — illiterate in internet culture, forthright in business — it took me back to Shannon. I felt that even Shannon, who was a terrible writer, would have been better suited to write my article, pick at sotce’s brain. She would have known what to ask her, she would have known how to elicit the answers people thirsted for.
I took a long break from writing and editing this interview because of the grandpa trigger, yes, but also because of where I was in my personal life. I felt broken in every way. I was experiencing depression in a way I had never before. The CODA meetings and the Lexapro and the therapy were not keeping up with where I felt that I was headed. How do I continue to work? How do I hide this from her? Be professional? Thoughts like that didn’t last too long, because just as she can smell your breath through the phone (so she claims), sotce can also smell when even the slightest thing is wrong. One particular morning, her eyes were especially demanding that I explain my shakiness. I couldn’t hide from her.
“I called the suicide hotline last night,” I blurted out through approaching tears.
She didn’t bat an eye. Her eyebrows may have crinkled for a moment, but her smile persisted. Her soul pumped through the screen and burrowed into my cold stiff hands. She was concerned, deeply concerned, yet there was a stillness to it all. I had never felt concern without a wall of panic crushing down onto it.
I don’t remember what she said, all that I remember was her stillness.
In that moment, she didn’t give me an answer in the form of a sharp and witty sentence, a rant, a heart formed with her hands. There was no answer at all. There was no ensuing advice, no shock or panic. There was no mistrust, confusion, worry. It was just her. She was just there.
I wished so badly for so long that everyone could experience her the way that I got to experience her in that moment. But how? In a world that demands content and stimulation, how would you ever commodify stillness?
As I was gathering screenshots to implement into this article, I realized that the pause she took with me, is the pause she takes with everything, from a video about visiting your family during the holidays that took her a week to edit, to a meme of a bunny that says “god” under it. The stillness and tranquility, that innate presentness is always there, between all the nooks of her craft.
Perhaps one day, I will release the equal beauty of her wordiness. Maybe one day I will screen record one of our four hour long Zoom calls, release one of her classic paragraph texts, take sequential pictures of her when she’s on an existential rant. But for now, I want you all to experience the harsh joy of her one-liners. Of her simplicity. Of the courage that is contained in her arrangement of just a few words. I want you all to be slapped with the equivalence of a yarn emoji when you feel like you need an essay. I want you all to have the pleasure of being punched in the face by her stillness when you feel like you want to die.
So, here is a list of out of context one-liners that sotce has texted me, tweeted, made a meme of, said in a Patreon video, answered on Tumblr, said to me in passing, that have, and always will, stick with me:
1. go find a dog in the clouds
2. I can’t dare to dream most of the time
3. the cupcake emoji
4. I do love being on my phone
5. closure is often times just agreeing on the story
6. there’s nothing worse than a man who had a good weekend, Sawyer
7. not every day needs to be incredible
8. reading a book in the park actually sucks
9. i don’t have a new year’s resolution because i am just a girl
10. i hope u are proud of me
11. i feel like a marble that is about to drop off the table
12. his version of things sort of doesn’t matter, does it?
13. in the end they always tell me i was too much
14. slammed doors are hardly ever shut
15. thank you for opening yourself up and treating me like a best friend in the dark
