Magic, Memes, & Meditation: Sotce’s Summer-School Diary

To feel like I could get close to embodying her, I took a great silence first. This is what Sotce had advised anyway.

The spiritual poster, writer, and artist is dialing in from Massiaru, Estonia, where she’s preparing to host her second annual “Summer School,” a five-day stay at a post-Soviet boarding school. Handpicked from hundreds of applications, the attendees will experience a curriculum of writing, magic, yoga, singing, and meditation — practices intended, as Sotce puts it, to help them “develop their trust in themselves, confidence, and intuition.”

Since finding TikTok virality in 2020 for her equivocal observations, arcane memes, diaries spanning from girlhood to Buddhist philosophy, and podcasts, Sotce (pronounced “Sot-see”) has cultivated a devoted online following. Her musings quickly became a refuge for hyper-online girls, eventually catching the fashion world’s attention, leading to fashion campaigns as well as a clothing line inspired by her own Internet iconography. Stillness (or meditation) isn’t just a theme in her work but the place from which she creates. “It is work and discipline to stay in tune with yourself, but I honestly don’t know what else we should be doing here besides that,” she says, “here” being Earth. “And it’s cheap... No, it’s free. It’s literally f*cking free.” Her art (which she confesses she didn’t know was art until the Internet had told her) depends upon this — and you can feel it.

As a 19-year-old, she was “sent away” to a Buddhist monastery in India (a story she’ll explore for the first time in her forthcoming debut novel, Love You), where she captured her first TikTok video: a black cat prancing across a path that received 3 million views overnight. This was COVID TikTok, and she had somehow stumbled into a post-Tumblr audience, ready to receive her. “It was nuts on there. It was two brothers shirtless, people doing cosplay, these early debates that were really ‘teenager.’” She hadn’t been hyper-online prior to posting and wasn’t aware that she had been speaking directly to a specific community of girls who had been waiting for it.

Soon, she was responsible for some of the most recognizable TikToks of the era, sometimes captioned with original mantras, or picturing a comic dog telling something to a comic bunny, yet always communicating something profound. The Internet has since adopted elements of her visual language, with Arial font over photos and simplified metaphorical storytelling becoming a recognizable genre. “That’s so fun and gratifying that that’s a thing now.” Often, she sees stuff like this on the Internet — and she can’t tell whether or not she had made it.

The world she’s built online has since expanded offline through Summer School, where Sotce selected attendees she describes as “brave, interesting, alive, maybe sort of disenchanted with the state of things, and sort of in on the joke.” As a grassroots effort, she also recruited eight of her friends to lead different wellness sessions creating the conditions for the kind of stillness that underpins her work. “Every single person who is unaligned with their experience [is] not sitting quietly and listening. We’re inundated with media and opinions and everyone wants to tell you exactly who they are and convince you who you are... We spend our entire lives running in f*cking circles, dating the same type of person who’s just like our parents, having the same type of relationships,” she reflects. “You’re free. You’re completely free. You’re not a f*cking tree. You can go.” Below, she has shared her photo diary from the experience.

“setting up classrooms”

“yoga class”

“clay class”

“foraging class”

“some students”

“magic class”

“kitchen angels”

“singing class”

“singing class continued”

“writing class”

“magic class”

“girls at dinner”

“untitled No. 1013”