Meet Peachy Death

Today we’d like to introduce you to Peachy Death.

Hi Peachy, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Where to begin when every moment is a beginning? Hi, I’m Peachy! I’m telling you that I love you right off the bat, and I mean it. Some “justs” about me: I just turned 30, just moved to Kansas City from Rochester, NY, just spent the last year viscerally fighting for those aforementioned beginnings. But I’ll get to that. I’m just five feet tall, just a mother to birds, just your new neighbor who works at the dress shop. I am an artist or something adjacent. Performance art, makeup/cosmetic art, visual art, and emotional art. I am a two-time theatre school drop-out. I work at Retro Vixen on 39th Street and have been known to hug you and hold your hands and cry with you on the job. I am a “creative” through and through, whatever that means, and will spare no expense to surround myself in delight and whimsy. I am one year into recovery from 20 years of chronic, “severe enduring” Anorexia nervosa. Finally, I spent a lot of years 1-29 trying to un-become.

Now I am spending every moment re-becoming. Self-expression has been the bane of my existence, truly. I was an actress for a long time; sang opera for a while. Got a taste for the avant-garde and moved onto performance art, then into body modification, then into drag, and then into rather extreme makeup projects that would usually be inspired by a song or a poem. I am absolutely, maddeningly obsessed and in love with Tori Amos. I follow her (and follow her… and follow her…) around the world when she tours, and have been doing that since I was 18. She’s the one who coined my nickname, Peachy Death – after Neil Gaiman’s Sandman character Death, whom she told me that I was the human embodiment of. I like words and storytelling and do some pretty stunning regional British dialects. I have one unsuccessful marriage behind me, but that’s okay because he got me a bouncy house for my birthday one year. I have three rescued starlings as pets, who I have raised since their first days of life. They are my real, true babies, through and through. I ended up in Kansas City because my partner is here (juicy story, wouldn’t you like to know?!), and I absolutely adore it. Everyone has been so weird and wonderful and willing to show up; exchange experiences, love, magic, and vulnerability. I have met the most exceptionally special people, especially some of my kids at work. It’s totally heartening and inspiring and I am so grateful for everyone’s willingness to share themselves with me.

Right now, I am going through a personal Renaissance – not only reclaiming my life but figuring out how to engage with it. We make it up as we go along. Creatively speaking, my efforts right now are predominantly manifesting through makeup and styling (and, self-indulgently, being my own model). Fashion and visual-representation-of-Self have always felt very meaningful and very important in my life and how I move through it. I’ve always perceived visual self-expression as your one real chance to get to communicate exactly who you are to the world; a clear visual way to express your authentic Self and your own Truth. I have a little old thing called “synaesthesia”, which for me means that I hear a lot of very strong colors and feel a lot of very bold shapes. I want to show up to this world exactly as I am and reassure those around me that they can absolutely do the same. I want to communicate my path here, my reality, my lived experiences, my triumphs, but mostly my lifelong growing pains and how I’ve survived beyond them, and to pass along solace and wisdom as I am able. Hi, I’m Peachy; Peachy Death if we were being formal, but we’re not. I’m a multi-faceted artist-thing who spent a lot of time dying and is now putting everything into living. I’m new here, but I’ve been around for a while, and it is my divine joy to know you.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The eating disorder, bar none, above all else. With that, major depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, PTSD, that have all had me on my knees. A shopping list of diagnoses that I’ve been carrying in my pocket for three decades, hoping that someday will finally be the day where I get to cross something off the list. Well, eventually, I got one.

“You found me, you found me
Burning, burning in despair
You said then, I know, dear
It has been a brutal year”

As always, Tori Amos says it best. 2021 was my year of profound loss, profound grief, profound sickness, profound healing, profound acceptance, profound change, profound letting go. My own Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion, too, says it best). Anorexia is a word I have a hard time saying. A word that especially, I have a hard time saying in relation to myself. It trips me up, stops me in my tracks. Takes my breath away. I have been sick for two decades. Consumed by this un-utterable illness for more of my life than I have not been. The sharp-toothed shadow always looming behind me, clinging to my back. I did not welcome her, but I have always let her in. For nearly 20 years, I have let her in. I’ve cycled in and out of treatment facilities, hospitals, doctors’ and therapists’ offices since I was fourteen. Feeding tubes and IVs and blood draws and finger pricks and heart monitors and the hums and chirps of machines confirming that I still exist. Broken and fractured my soul over and over. I’ve danced with Death before. And I continued to let her in.

This year, my year of profound loss, almost took me with it. To try and conceptualize something like, “I almost died… like, really almost died” borders on the absurd. In Anorexia, you are invincible. Until you’re not. I now realize that I, myself, am not. I spent one month in Denver at the most intensive medical care facility for eating disorders in the country. And, for maybe the first time in the history of being treated for my illness, I felt truly seen. Truly seen, beyond the shroud of the anorexic shadow, and given hope that maybe my life could be different. That I could invite change in and break the chain that had entwined me and claimed me for 20 years. I was seen, and I was saved.

Every minute of every brutal day, I was physically and emotionally brought to my knees. It was truly the most excruciating thing I have ever experienced, but absolutely the most beautiful, the most transformative, the most healing, the most necessary. My soul was stripped bare, and their team of angels nurtured me back to something more whole. More capable, more hopeful. And then somehow, through the divine grace and mercy of the Universe, Anorexia let me out. She f*cking let me out. My hands shake as I write this; another thing that feels impossible to conceptualize. This year has truly razed me, but it also spits me back out. Released me from myself.

And so I continue to heal and continue to grieve. I feel lost most of the time; unsure of myself in the absence of my familiar, self-contained anorexic bell jar. But I was let out. And so the rest will come into focus eventually, and I allow myself to believe that. Lean into the blind faith that healing will happen. I end this year and start anew by letting go and also holding on. Recovery is possible for everyone – I believe that with every part of me.

“Change waltzes in with her sister, Pain
Waiting for you to send her away
Wish her well
Break the chain,
Break the chain
I feel you…”

I wrote that back in January. I am now one year, five months out and into recovery… I kept leaning into the blind faith, and leaning in, and leaning in. And, my god. This Living thing is so much more than anything I could have ever dreamt or hoped for. It’s Beyond My Wildest Expectation.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Quantifying your own work is, in a word, poopy. I work with makeup, I work with fashion, I am a stylist and a curator of clothing. I am a performer and storyteller at my core. I work with people. I am pretty wordy. My main source of inspiration is human emotion. Sometimes I pick up a marker and do some hand-lettering, sometimes I pick up a notebook and work on some sort of poem-thing, sometimes I spent a lot of time watching myself cry in the mirror. Performance artist Marina Abramović, one of my heaviest personal and professional influences, likes to say, “You give me your time, I give you Experience.” And I think that’s what I do, too. Whether it’s whisking you away into a dressing room at work and helping you simultaneously bare your soul while crafting the look of your dreams… sitting in a dark Autumnal backyard retelling the tale of the Wendigo under moon – and cigarette-light only… conjuring up a dreamscape on my own face… turning words and melodies into colors… laying on a bed of shattered shards of mirror without the cover of clothing and letting yourself be observed… finding the way to shriek and laugh your way through Hell, until you finally make it out alive able to tell your tales. I’m a vessel for something else. That’s all I know. And however it manifests is how it’s going to manifest, and we’ll figure out how to cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, try coming into Retro Vixen and letting me into your world for a while – there’s treasure to be found. Living Peachy Death: performance and makeup artist, happy little helper at Retro Vixen, occasional model, occasional drag queen, occasional wordsmith, occasional soundsmith, soul-trader, experience-exchanger, and someone who will look into your eyes and really see you.

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
This is really interesting to take a deep-dive on into… I feel like such a mixed bag in terms of the industries that I have my little toesies dipped in, so let’s take a walkabout. Makeup and fashion have evolved, and are evolving, profoundly. We really witnessed something special and monumental taking place in the makeup industry’s advancement over the last 15 or so years, especially as other types of creatives have started coming into that space and coming up with cosmetics that exist in ways we’ve never seen before. As an artist, it’s extremely tantalizing to work with products created by other artists because they understand what’s compelling and what’s innovative and what’s visually effective. Pat McGrath is a huge inspiration to me. (This is where I would ideally be including my Venmo in case anyone wants to Pat McGrath me for Christmas)

Kavita Kaul (@kavitakaul on Instagram), Tori Amos’ makeup artist and stylist, is also someone in this field that I really look to as doing work that I admire. The result of the emotional and visual collaboration between she and Tori is so touching and impactful, and as long as opportunities and bonds like that continue to exist, I think this field will be just fine. Fashion and clothing are having their own reckoning right now, too, I think. We’re fighting hard for size inclusivity. We’re fighting hard for gender inclusivity. We’re fighting hard against sizeism, fatphobia, transphobia, diet culture, a society whose fundamental pillars are so deeply, intrinsically skewed (or just wrong). The logistics of the industry itself are, finally, starting to shift a little. You also look at what’s going on and has been going on in the world around us, and it’s a really terrifying, fascinating, frenetic time to be alive and living in; this is the kind of chaos/pain/frenzy that usually prompts a big artistic resurgence. That’s already been showing up in fashion – look at Rick Owens and Michele Lamy, look at Berlin nachtclub outfits that have trickled down into the DollsKill mainstream, look at the Balenciaga show that just happened. It’s the end of days, baby, and we are looking ferocious and ready for whatever’s coming.

As for the other stuff.. art is never going anywhere. Storytelling is never going anywhere. Performance is never going anywhere. However, it may shapeshift or evolve, it’s never going anywhere. Those are our tried and true, pre-historic failsafes that allow us to share ourselves and continue on.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/peachydeath
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livingpeachydeath
• Other: https://www.acute.org/sam-m-breaking-chain *AND* https://www.spreaker.com/user/15234467/breaking-the-chain

Image Credits
All image credit to Peachy except the pink-haired arm-warmer portrait and the pink-hair-pink-dress portrait, which are both by Rudy Fabre (@lifeofrudeboy on IG)