That is cruelty, and cruelty comes from a defect of the heart, from a person who is simply missing the thing that makes us human, and you cannot repair a defect of the heart, because there is nothing there to work with.

If that had been what my brother did, I would have walked away from him for good, and been right to.

But it was not what he did.

What my brother did came from a different place entirely, a place I could understand, because I have felt the edges of it myself: he acted out of shame, and shame is not a defect of the heart but a kind of excess of it.

Shame is what you feel when you care so much about how you are seen by the people you love that the prospect of being seen as a failure becomes, in a warped and desperate moment, more unbearable than any other outcome, including outcomes that are objectively far worse.