See yourself in what still stands.

Welcome to Shutter Release

This space is for those who know survival isn't always loud. It's subtle. Stubborn. Visibly damaged but still holding.

Shutter Release is where I explore how creative practice, whether through the lens of a camera, the weight of clay in your hands, the scratch of charcoal on paper, or words spilled onto a page, becomes both metaphor and mirror for grief, beauty, and what it means to keep standing. Here, the haunted architecture of New Orleans serves as backdrop and teacher, but the real subject is how we rebuild ourselves through making.

Is This for You?

This space is for you if you:

✦ Make things when words fail you

✦ Need a place to feel seen without being fixed

✦ Want to document your story through any medium, but don't know where to start

✦ Are still grieving, still building, and still trying to make something with it

✦ Feel like healing is too clean of a word for what you're doing, but you're doing it anyway

What You'll Find Here

Each week, I share:

✦ Visual essays that tell the truth about survival through creativity

✦ Unvarnished observations on what it means to stay present inside a body that remembers everything, and how making things becomes the space between breaking and mending

This is so much more than a productivity space. It's a still-standing space. For those rebuilding themselves after loss. For those who can't sit still but can work with their hands. For those who document in fragments because wholeness feels impossible.

For those who use their camera roll like evidence, their margins like breathing room, their late-night creative projects like proof they were here. For those who know that sometimes survival looks like making something—anything—when everything else has stopped making sense.

This is a place to observe, notice what remains, and maybe even make something with it.

📸 Subscribe for free to get my letters and creative essays in your inbox.

A Personal Note

I’m kd, the voice behind Borderline Obsessing. After surviving the loss of my 18-year-old son to suicide, and barely surviving my own suicide attempt after being found by my 11-year-old, I turned to my creativity as a survival tool — something to hold my grief and trauma quietly while I found words again. I didn’t expect it to become a full framework for surviving, noticing, and gently making meaning out of trauma.

Shutter Release is a place for those of us who are still here, still hurting, still creating, or wanting/trying to learn how to create just to survive. It’s for anyone who outlasted something they thought they couldn’t, and now needs a way to live with the aftermath.

If that’s you, welcome. You’re in the right place.

💌 Subscribe for free for weekly essays, prompts, and photo-based reflections.

Become a Paid Subscriber

If Shutter Release has made you feel a little more seen, a little less alone, this is your invitation to go deeper with me.

Paid subscribers receive:

✦ Exclusive creative toolkits — photography tips, visual prompts, and survival-based practices to help you make something with the mess
✦ Behind-the-lens reflections — personal insights and emotional techniques I’ve developed over more than a decade of using photography as grief’s language
✦ Walkthroughs of selected images — the meaning, the memory, and the moment behind the frame
✦ Access to the private chat — a quiet community space for photo-sharing, gentle prompts, and creative support from others who get it

It’s about connection.
If you’re looking for a creative way to process what you’re carrying, and a place to do it alongside others, you’re already in the right place.

I’d love to have you in the room.