project
UNBURDENED
2025
Installment 1:
Luci Leduke on
SexualSelf-Abandonment
CLICK HERE TO FIND THE AUDIO TO LUCI’S INTERVIEW
I am asking the subjects of my project the question “When is the last time you felt sincere shame” because I am fascinated by shame’s function– how it operates like an invasive species, populating itself within every cell of every person who holds it, passing itself on, until nobody looks at each other in the eyes anymore. It is so scary to talk about, so I wonder, if we all talk about it, perhaps we can be more free. This is not a new idea. Sharing your darkest secret with your closest lover or friend, your pastor, your sponsor, your therapist– we have been doing this since the beginning of time, since we realized that experiences have a tendency to haunt, we have always desired to be unburdened.
“Is it shame or is it guilt? They’re both obviously very selfish, like self preservation, when we’re all just people trying to live our fucking lives.”
When I met Luci, I knew I’d hit the jackpot. I sat next to her at one of our secret meetings and looked at her cool tattoos, her cool shoes, her cool hair. One of the prettiest, coolest girls I’d ever seen. I wanted to make her laugh, but she out-funnied me. From that moment on, we were dear friends. Love at first sight.
Here are some of the things Luci has said to me in the past few years of knowing her:
“No matter what, you’ll be okay. You’ll always be okay,
That person’s weird and I knew it from the jump,
You’re beautiful, babe,
Who fucking cares,
I’m so glad you’re here,
If you think for a moment
that you’re imposing, I’m going to kill you,
I got us dinner,
Yes,
You should come with me,
Again, I’m so glad you’re here,
I love you,
You don’t have to go”
I find myself turning towards Luci when I need to let go of something. She usually provides an alternative perspective about something I’ve deemed to be shameful, which in my head, equates to fatal. She undoes that for me. Keeps me connected to why life is tolerable, or possibly, at times, good.
I visit Luci this week and we spend every night sitting on the couch together, in our underwear, eating Chinese takeout, or Thai takeout, or Salvadoran takeout, filling up her New York railroad apartment with cigarette smoke, and watching
perfect movies (28 days later, 28 weeks later, Final Destination, the Sherri Panino documentary, and Sanctuary.) We argue over the position of our legs until we find comfort with my foot tucked into the back of her bent knee, and her leg flopped over mine, the bottoms of our bare feet pressing themselves together. We pause so that I can take a shower, and when I’m done, I run, bare naked through her apartment like a child, laughing with joy, shameless. She, my sister of sorts, rolls her eyes. I ask her if it was funny to see me do that, and she rolls her eyes harder,even more lovingly.
I get dressed and we talk about our girlfriends and how pretty they are. How it’s nice to be loved like this again. How last year, I stepped into a stranger’s home, a simmering, dreadful man, and turned my mind off, for the sole purpose of forgetting – that I exist, that I came there for something too pathetic to admit, that I didn’t really want sex. I wept in my car after. That was not new to me – begging to be filled by something rotten. And worse, after, but not because I abandoned myself, the same man took the same rotten force and used it against me. For days after, I was not real.
I’m scared to be alone in any house with any man that I do not know. These are two different parts of a story: one, where I’ve induced my own shame by saying yes, please, more, now. Getting on bare hands and bare knees and asking for a near stranger who I’d been infatuated with to make something of me, when in my head, all I wanted was to have familiar, warm hands holding my belly as I fell asleep. Then, there is the violation of men who hurt people, move to a new city, keep hurting people, and then move again, not stopping once to wonder how many lives they’ve ruined, how many people they’ve made remove their mind from the rest of their body, so as not to feel desire, fear, pain.
But the latter, the kind that involves relentless, godless men, we aren’t talking about in today’s story. It’s just something that we spoke about on the couch, while eating takeout and watching Cillian Murphy kill zombies.
Luci is a ridiculous woman. There are few people who make me laugh as hard as she does. She takes everything and nothing seriously. To me, she is a low-shame kind of girl. A heroin addict in recovery, she’s been sober 7 years now, and I admire the way she balances discipline with fucking around and finding out. When she does, I watch her confront the consequences, unafraid, in a way that I admire.
On my second day in Ridgewood, I wake to her on the phone with someone who is angry. Luci is speaking very little, and the person on the other line is telling her everything: where Luci had fucked up, why it was fucked up, and how fucked up it is that they (the person on the other end of the line) has nothing to do but watch and be sad. Though it hurt someone’s feelings, what Luci did was not an inherently evil thing. It really isn’t bad, at all. So she paces around her apartment, calm, with her phone to her ear.
Luci listens, agrees, apologizes, listens, asks what she can do to repair the damage, listens some more, says okay, then goodbye, and then hangs up.
We leave her apartment for our morning walk. After a few moments of quiet, I ask her how she feels about it all.
“Well”, she says, “ I’ll do things differently next time. But I feel free, I guess. I mean, I feel bad, but free, because I didn’t ignore the phone call.”
This, I’m learning, is how shame operates. It sits there in your core, expanding the more you ignore it, becoming rageful, climbing over your shoulders and down your back, swallowing your legs, until you are a shell– an alien with no substance, no appetite, a lack of sleep, a gnarly awareness that time only hurdles forward, that we cannot go back, no matter how badly we want it to.
“I think some shame can stay, but I think that also has to do with what you’re doing to work through that.”
One day, I’ll be like Luci. Disciplined. She told me, on this same post-phone call, walking down to the bagel shop, that she “does not lie, not ever.” It’s simply not something she can let herself do anymore. This must be what loosens the calcified rot of shame, an acid that melts it from the stomach lining and lets it pass through: honesty.
“I was not a good person…or, I wasn’t a bad person, but dumb and inconsiderate of other people’s feelings.”
Despite all of this, I know Luci. I know that to be that free, one has to have operated differently before. Unless you’re born a saint, in which case, I hope you have a little bit of fun and burn in hell with the rest of us faggots.
It’s my last day in New York. I’m headed to a date with a sweet girl that I met at a secret meeting (the ones for alcoholics, I’m not supposed to say it here, but you know what I mean), and Luci is scrambling, ever so gracefully, to leave for work.
“Oh” she remarks, “we didn’t do your interview!”
“Oh, you’re right” I had been hauranging her about this project all week, and naturally, had not made any proper moves to actually do it.
I pull my phone out and start the recording, following her around like a chihuahua follows its owner, as she gets dressed, washes her face, tends to her pitbull, Toad, and finds her purse.
“I felt really disappointed in myself, because I’ve done that a lot, I’ve fucked someone becasue I thought it was the right thing to do, and I’m like…you just put yourself in a really weird situation.”
In the audio portion of today’s installment, Luci and I discuss a one night stand she had that felt nonconsensual, to herself, that, like my experience with many sexual escapades, left her feeling a sense of disillusionment, disappointment, shame. She dives into the taboo conversation around sex with strangers and sex with partners. How, for herself, boundaries tend to change. I am grateful to have had such an honest guest who is willing to access something that we usually only talk about in secret.. I guess Luci doesn’t lie. Thanks, babe, I love you.