Some people walk through the world as if it were wallpaper: flat, decorative, forgettable. And then there are people who notice.
I think I’ve always felt an inexplicable pull toward people who notice. People who make eye contact not just with your face but with your mood. People who recognize a change in the way your voice dips, or the way your hands start fidgeting when something’s off. The ones who ask, “You okay?” not because they have to but because they felt it. There’s a kind of sacred intimacy in being noticed.
I am not impressed by grand gestures. I melt when someone remembers the way I part my hair, or that I always hesitate before crossing the street. I love when someone notices how I clip my hair: a catcher at the back or the shade of lipstick I’ve started wearing lately. I love when someone recognizes the perfume I used three weeks ago and asks if I changed it. That’s not obsession. That’s care.
The art of noticing isn’t loud. It’s not showy.
It’s not the kind of thing that earns applause. But it’s deep.
It’s someone catching the slight tremble in your laughter and asking, quietly, “Are you sure?”
It’s someone remembering you always order your coffee with a splash of milk and exactly a table spoon of Braums sugar. It’s someone who sees you shrinking in a room and shifts the energy so you don’t have to explain.
These people…people who notice are rare.
They’re the kind who see the fraying sleeve of a favorite shirt and know it means something to you. They’ll notice when you wear your “safe” sweater on a hard day. They’ll compliment you not because your dress is trendy, but because you look like yourself in it.
People who notice things in others small gestures, nervous tics, quiet habits they are artists in their own right. They are tender curators of the world. They live in a heightened state of emotional perception, a constant state of subtle awareness. And they don’t do it to gain something. They do it because they feel more.
I think noticing is a love language.
And in a world obsessed with loud declarations and filters and likes, the quiet act of truly seeing someone is revolutionary.
So if you’re one of those people who catches the smallest shifts in people, who notices chipped nail polish or tired eyes, who compliments someone’s scarf because you know it’s the one their grandma gave them. Please don’t change.
You’re holding the threads of humanity together.
