My name is Kimberly Brown and I’m an illustrator and author based in a little town next to the ocean on the east coast of NSW, Australia. ‘Outsider’ is the newsletter I write and illustrate using the metaphor of running around outside to navigate my way into the more uncomfortable depths of adulthood. It’s about being outside, but also getting outside my comfort zone, and outside my perceptions and expectations. Then there’s the trope of being an Outsider, something that doesn’t quite fit in, that moves against the prevailing flow. A lot of the ideas I’m exploring here do just that - question and critique the modern wisdom of success, achievement, status, complexity, and accumulation in favour of something much less shiny, impressive, or grammable.

Does that answer the question?

I hear you.

And maybe you don’t. Don’t worry, I’m not going to yell at or try to manipulate you. I started subscribing to newsletters because it gave me a way to triage my information flow. I deleted my most addictive social apps and replaced them with a handful of long-form, artsy newsletters from people who make me think or inspire me or whose work I generally love and respect. I find the simplicity relaxing. It’s deeper, more thoughtful, slower. I need that. Maybe you don’t. Or maybe you don’t need it from me.

By all means, I am a huge proponent of simplifying your life.

But these ideas I’m spelunking here, the ones that go beneath the surface of my life, right down to the muggy, dark places that I avoided in my twenties…they’re worthwhile and profound and (at least for me) paradigm-shifting. I want to share them with whoever is interested in being part of that conversation. This is your formal invitation.

Some of the posts will be free to anyone, but there will be a bunch that will only be for paid subscribers. That will include the occasional video or art tutorial. I decided to go the paid newsletter route because I’m unbelievably tired of paying for things with my privacy and attention. I want the people who subscribe to find value in what they sign up to here. I want to be accountable to those wonderful humans who trust me with that. I want to challenge the system where everything is free and we’re held prisoner by the dopamine scroll. It’s all that and also, I don’t have a lot of other income streams at the moment, so it all helps.

If you haven’t used Substack before, you just sign up (I use the app on my phone) and from there you can subscribe to individual newsletters as you like. There are some pretty big names on here now and many of those are free. But you’ll only get notifications from people that you choose to follow and because it’s a paid platform, no ads or content is being pushed that you haven’t asked for. That’s nice sometimes.

So that’s about it. Subscribe if you want to see it for yourself.