I once lay awake for most of a night thinking about the angle of a cupboard in my kitchen. The ceiling wasn’t straight and there was an uneven shadow gap above it that, to me, was too obvious to move past. Of course, I was the only person in the house who had even noticed.

I have been told, more than once and mostly kindly (albeit with an eye roll), that I notice “too much”. That I should let things go because, in the grand scheme of things, they don’t matter. I’m particular. Picky. The sort of person who notices things everyone else has already forgotten.

(I understand that people would be irritated by my regular grammar correction. Cue more eye rolls. But I know I’m not alone in my dogmatism that multiple things are not less, they’re fewer.)

To keep the peace, you’re supposed to keep it to yourself, which would mean you’d have to spend a lot of time quietly aware of things that bother you. I have in the past apologised for being too involved in the details, too interested in the angle of a picture on the wall, too focused on a seam not being straight. Perhaps I have therefore softened and kept quiet, or framed the noticing as a question rather than a statement, even rolling eyes at myself before anyone else could.

But perhaps it was never a flaw that needed to be managed. Perhaps it’s simply the way I experience the world.

Here’s what I think noticing actually is once you take the apology out of it. It’s a form of love that doesn’t require an audience. You don’t make your folds precise and just so because someone’s watching. You do it because you know, and the satisfaction of making it right is enough.

It’s also a kind of intelligence that doesn’t get called that. Nobody calls the woman who notices the stitching a genius. They call her particular, fussy. As though attention were a character flaw instead of a way of thinking. But noticing is a skill. It’s pattern recognition applied to the smallest, least rewarded things. It’s the same brain that catches the plot hole in the book everyone else loved, or hears the wrong note in the song nobody else is listening to that closely.

Psychologists call it high perceptual sensitivity. But despite it having a name, I don’t see it as a disorder. I simply think that some of us receive more signal, which means the world arrives with more texture, more nuance, more everything. The colours are more vivid. The sounds are more present. The wrong note lands harder. The right detail lands better. About fifteen to twenty percent of people have it, which means roughly one in five of the people you know are quietly registering things the other four walked straight past. They’re not being difficult. They’re receiving more signal.

This sensitivity has another side. Someone like me who notices when things aren’t quite right is also very adept at noticing when things are just right. And feel the joy more strongly when it happens.

I have a particular Spotify playlist called Moments of Music Joy and it currently contains 23 songs. Each of these songs has one moment that brings me so much joy and satisfaction that I have that physical reaction, a moment of euphoria. It includes the intro to Holiday by Green Day, the bridge in Wouldn’t It Be Good by Nik Kershaw, the opening guitar and beat of When Doves Cry by Prince or Taylor’s soaring vocals in Don’t Blame Me. There are twenty notes in The Boys of Summer by Don Henley that raise the hairs on my forearms over 40 years after I first heard the song. And the crescendos at the end of the bridges in War by Yungblud and OMG by The Neighbourhood bring their own kind of ecstasy. I know I’m not the only one who feels this joy.

Some call this a frisson. The word comes from the French word for shiver and is the response when sudden, beautiful, or expectedly right artistic elements trigger goosebumps, tingles, or a wave of pleasure driven by dopamine.

James Joyce called it aesthetic arrest, describing the “luminous, silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure where an object’s wholeness and harmony stop you completely in your tracks.” I have these moments regularly.

The ones like me notice the texture of paper, the smell of books, the particular shade of that blue. The sentence that lands so precisely it makes you put the book down for a moment. The same sensitivity that lingers over what is unresolved also recognises the rare pleasure of something that feels completely resolved. You don’t get one without the other. Two things can be true at once. And it is my thesis that the right thing, when you find it, is worth all the almost right things you had to walk away from to get there.

I am building a brand out of this, because I know that one in five of you understands this and searches for it. Every button, every natural fabric, every handwritten word, every layer of every image came from the part of me that both appreciates the aesthetic arrest and lay awake about the cupboard. It turns out that part of me is not a flaw to be managed, but has become the basis for a business plan.

So if you are the person who notices the jarring plastic button, the slightly wrong shade, the typo in the sentence that everyone else read straight past, you are not difficult. You are paying a kind of attention many people don’t afford anything. And the reward is that you get to feel that satisfaction when everything is perfect.

Nothing accidental. That’s one of the core phrases I am using in my brand’s language bank. If you notice everything, you also make everything with the same consideration. So it’s not a slogan really, just an expression of how I already lived. It turns out that I’m not just building a brand out of clothing, paper and objects. I’m building one around a way of seeing.

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