The Double Standard We Don't See

We hold others accountable for what they do. Not what they meant. Not what was happening inside them when they did it. Just the action, visible, measurable, impossible to argue with. He left. She lied. They didn't show up. We take what we can see and we build our judgement on that. The intention stays invisible so we treat it like it doesn't exist.
But when it comes to ourselves, we flip the entire framework.
We did something wrong but we meant well. We hurt someone but we didn't intend to. We failed but we know how hard we were trying. The action becomes secondary. The intention becomes the whole defence. We stand inside our own experience and judge from there, from the warmth of what we were trying to do, from the version of ourselves we know we meant to be.
And both of these feel completely natural. That is the strange part.
It feels fair to judge others by what they did because that is all we have access to. We cannot see inside anyone. All we get is behaviour. So we work with what we have.
And it feels fair to judge ourselves by intention because that is all we have access to from the inside. We know what we meant. We know the full story. So we work with what we have.
The problem is not that one is right and the other is wrong. The problem is that we apply them selectively and never notice we are doing it.
We extend to ourselves the grace we refuse to give others. And we hold others to a standard we would never survive ourselves.
Maybe knowing this doesn't fix it. But it does make it harder to pretend we are being fair.