The hardest kind of fairness is applying the standard when your emotions prefer an exception.

Standards are cheap when you have no stake. The difficulty arrives when applying yours would cost you something you want, or would go against someone you feel for. At that point every argument for an exception becomes available and persuasive, and you will not experience yourself as bending. You will experience yourself as finally seeing the nuance.

Notice when nuance appears at exactly the moment the standard would cost you. That timing is the signal. Ask what you would say if the same nuance were offered to you by someone else in the same spot, and let that answer carry more weight than how you feel right now.