Reading · The Satisfaction Standard

"How do you want to celebrate?"

Somebody who loves me asks me that every year when my birthday rolls around and every year something in me starts to fritz because the honest answer is one I could never quite put into words until this year.

I don't want to have to think about how.

I love my birthday. I always have. That’s what made the freeze so confusing, that I could want the day this much and still dread the one part where I have to sit down and design my own celebration, pick the place, set the intention, decide what would make it good and then go make it good, not to mention all the set up.

My birthday is often a solo day. It's soft and slow, filled with freebies and favorites, but when it comes to celebrating? I have no clue what that even means anymore.

My friend group has a standing get together once a month (one of the highlights of my month honestly) and unfortunately with life, it's one we had let slip for a couple of months the way you do when everyone is busy.

But it was time again, my birthday was here and I asked for two things. A gathering and gifts.

A gathering was easy. Getting together to have dinner or a small party is pretty normal nowadays and it's something I'm genuinely grateful to have, AND I didn't want my birthday to feel like a Sunday BBQ, so I decided to ask for gifts, specifically acts of service gifts.

Birthdays once you are an adult are... weird.

They turn into one more thing you have to do, almost almost a party you throw for other people. You pick the place, you make the reservation, send the invite, keep track of who is coming, food, music and everything else, and then you arrive at your own celebration having already done the entire job of it. It's literally event planning but without the paycheck.

There was never a declaration when I became an adult where this is what happens, so while some may say "that's just what happens" as you get older, I also wonder if that's simply what we've become in a productivity world, or because we've forgotten how to connect.

But being the woman who organizes everything does not get the day off from organizing simply because the occasion is her. It's just what you do, especially as a single woman.

The fix everybody offers for this is simple.

Just tell people what you want, ask for it, be specific, hand out the instructions and let us celebrate you.

And I understand why that is the answer, I do, but deciding what you want and then communicating it and then making sure it happens the way you pictured is the organizing. It's exhausting.

And I did not want to tell anybody how to celebrate me.

That is the part I could never say out loud before without feeling like a brat. I did not want to hand out a spec sheet for my own birthday and then receive back exactly what I ordered, like a woman signing off on a catering invoice. I wanted to be known. I wanted somebody to already have the answer, to see me the way I see them.

It's not about being too much or even being difficult.

It's about attunement and consideration from the people around you.

Ever since I was little, I was always the person who read the room and anticipated people's needs before they said anything.

I noticed two people at my place who seemed cold, so I go them blankets during a Human Design Projector meetup I host at my place in Austin, TX. They were like, "Oh my god, I was gonna ask for this." I know. I could tell.
I noticed when someone was exhausted, like my dad or friend, so I would get up to get them drinks or food. They'd say, "Oh I could've gotten that" to which I replied, "I know. But I got it. You're tired, just rest."
I noticed my cousin who was so used to running her household, working full-time at Google and being a single mom handle it all herself, so when I stayed with her, I cleaned up, made food, packed things when we went out, and handled it.

It's ingrained in me for many reasons I've unpacked over the years, but I wouldn't want to be anyone else.

I was simply desiring someone else to do that for me.

In 2025, I shed a lot, including friends who on the outside seemed great, but were actually incredibly inconsiderate. It broke my heart to realize that about people I gave so much to. It was only when it was convenient to them that they were "considerate", but I was a giver (too my own detriment, I'm aware), and I wanted to be surrounded by other givers who were thriving, too.

I declared after releasing those friendships, "I want to be around people who are thriving, not striving or surviving" and the words "radical reciprocity" and "considerate" cemented into my standards.

And over the last year, that is what actually filled back in. Not overnight and not because I willed it onto a vision board but because once you get that clear about what you will no longer hold, the people who only know how to take slowly stop fitting, and the givers find each other.

The friends around me now are considerate in the truly kind, unglamorous way, the ones who notice the thing before you name it and joyfully help or handle it without being asked.

So when I made what felt like a very big ask for my nervous system, a gathering and some gifts, they heard it and then took it somewhere I never told them to go.

Then I showed up and there was nothing for me to do.

"Nothing to do" is the least interesting phrase in the English language, unless you happen to be the person who always has or finds something to do. One friend had offered her house with another friend stepping in to help her set up, and both of them took the whole thing and ran with it.

By the time I walked through the door it was already alive in there, with added intimate touches of how well they knew me.

Ingredients for fajitas were made and her husband cooked the meat on the grill (only to disappear for us girls to have a party together - what a beautiful man). A wheel of brie, warm and nourishing, the kind of spread that says somebody wanted to actually feed me and not just check the food box ingredients. A Happy Birthday banner strung up over all of it, which is such a small thing that I did not expect it to catch me in the throat, and it did. And a cheesecake, my favorite dessert on the planet, topped with maroon carnations. Maroon/burgundy are my colors, cheesecake is my dessert, and I never had to sit down and hand any of that over. They took the lead, asked what they needed to and knew the rest, and not one decision landed back on me.

Anybody can put together a party. Being handed the right one, mine, without ever having to describe it first, is something else entirely. That’s what filled my eyes with subtle tears the rest of the night.

I sat down and I genuinely did not know what to do with myself.

Uncomfortable is the most apt word for it.

I am the person who often runs the room whether that's at an event or running someone's business as their Chief of Staff, and there was no room left to run. Safe to say I received it, badly at first, the way you receive anything you are catastrophically out of practice at. Okay, not badly, just awkwardly. My internal dialogue kept wanting to... do... and I asked "Can I do anything?", but my friend said, "Only if you truly want to."

I did, but I needed to practice simply receiving and someone not making me the bad guy for doing just that and NOT giving or helping.

I kept scanning for the gap I was supposed to fill, and there wasn't one. Underneath the discomfort it was one of the nicest things I've ever felt in my adult life - being celebrated, handed gifts... being seen.

And most of all, to not have to do a single thing to deserve it.

I have been the one holding the plan for as long as I can remember.

Not because anybody assigned it to me or because I'm a control freak about seating charts or operations but because I see the gaps before other people do and my body starts solving them before anything catches up. I've gotten paid very well for this in the past.

I know when the person on the far end of the table has not spoken in 20 minutes. I know when somebody is about to leave and is waiting for a graceful exit. I know when the energy has curdled and needs one comment to turn it back, and I usually make the comment before I have consciously decided to. It's is a whole operating system that's been running since childhood.

A client of mine - who I used to support as a business strategist and their COO - once described me to others like this: "Taylor knows how to track my nervous system before I do."

This coming from a CEO who literally helped people understand and more safely develop their nervous system.

Before I had any language for it, before I knew that "tracking" was a word people used for anything other than shipping. I can usually see very quickly what a person needs without ever having to talk to them. It has made me exceptional at my actual job, and I do not want to sit here and pretend it's a burden I got saddled with. (It also means I cannot watch a friend move through a relationship without breaking down another persons's psyche, so my friends have mixed feelings.)

It's also the reason I have almost never been at a table that I was not, on some level, running.

But the tracking only runs one direction. When you are the one who notices everyone, you are almost never the one being noticed, and after enough years you stop expecting it, you stop even clocking that it's missing. You just assume the seeing is your job to do, never a thing that gets done for you.

Being noticed, considered just because, is a skill we need to bring back.

A while back I was speaking at a four day event with over 100 people, and after speaking on stage for 3 days, I sat down with groups of 10-15 people at a time. Probably over 70 people total in those days asking me about business, human design, and how to build sustainable. I LOVED it. I enjoy speaking to individuals in a group setting, giving and seeing others until they cry (which many did)... AND it empties you out.

You are tracking the whole room for hours. You are the container and the creative flow.

A friend who was also at the event walked up midday, picked up my water bottle and shook it to see if there was anything left in it, then she walked away, and came back with water.

She never asked me, "Do you need anything?", which I would have answered with "I'm good" on pure reflex because I'm so in it and didn't even check in with my own needs. Plus, "I'm good" is often what comes out of my mouth when I don't have the bandwidth to run an inventory of myself in front of a person. She didn't make me assess, decide, and request. She just picked up the bottle, felt how light it was, and solved it.

I have told that story maybe a dozen times since. It cost her 90 seconds, yet it's one of the most cared for I have ever felt in my life.

You know how small the gesture was? Yet it was profoundly wonderful.

What's even better is an ask was never needed, just someone noticing and caring enough to show up.

I believe in asking and I've spent years of my life getting myself, CEOs, other women, and team members to state a need in a plain sentence without softening it into a suggestion or hiding because they think it's too much. It's very important to communicate, but it's also just as important to provide the kind of support to the people around you where you simply notice and show up.

(And no, it's not an inconvenience as some people are saying on the internet now when it comes to being friends with someone.)

I want us to encourage this in others and I want, in the actual life I am living, a handful of people who shake the bottle.

Nearly everyone I love has said some version of just tell me what you want and I'll do it, and they mean it with their whole heart. It is a blank check. It says you are in charge, name it and it is yours, I will not guess wrong or impose on you.

And it is still, with all that love behind it, one more thing on my list.

Because the labor was never the cooking. The labor is deciding what gets cooked, and by when, and who is going to be quietly miserable if nobody thinks about the one guest who does not eat that kind of food. I am still holding the vision, still assigning, the one who has to know. I have outsourced the arms and kept the entire head.

When help arrives as a question, the question hands the whole project back and that's where the exhaustion steals the joy of the experience.

Being asked what you need is not the same as not having to hold it.

I do not think anybody means it that way. I think we were all taught that asking is the respectful move, and honestly, in a lot of contexts that is true. I would rather be asked than have somebody decide for me and it not be anywhere close to something I like. (I have been on the receiving end of a person's confident guess about what I wanted, and let me tell you, the confident guess is not always the win.)

But there is a whole category of person, and if you are still reading you are probably it, who is never once relieved by the question. She's relieved by its absence, the attunement and someone seeing her.

I used to think it was rare being the one who sees everything and also the one who gets seen, but when you're surrounded by the right people, the givers, it's actually not as rare as you might think.

The birthday dinner from my friends showed me the difference between default and intentional care: default care waits to be dispatched but intentional care goes and looks. It's proactive.

One of them actually lifts weight off the person receiving it, and the weight in question is the invisible (deciding, noticing, anticipating), and everything else, however generous, leaves the heaviest objects still not the other person's shoulders.

There is a version of overnourishment I have never written about, and this is it. I coined the word "over nourishment" for what comes after a boundary, refilling yourself so deliberately that you operate from overflow instead of obligation, and I have always talked about it physically. Sleep, food, money, rest, creativity, even the body. (No, this is not balance.)

But there is a social version, and it is rarer and harder to arrange because you can't buy it or schedule it for yourself. It's being around others who remove it from your shoulders. Sometimes that's one evening where the thing you are best at in the entire world is not required and they just take care of you.

If you had asked me my love language, I would have said acts of service-gift giving without hesitating (specifically the gifts that are acts of service), but my birthday celebration showed me a subtle love language no one names - the art of noticing.

Pick one person. You already know who. It's the person in your life who books the thing, starts a group text, remembers the anniversary or shows up when they're not asked to.

Then simply notice and skip the question.

Don't say, "what can I do," "tell me what you want" or "let me know if you need anything," simply look at what's actually happening and solve one piece of it without checking in first. Bring the water, book the table or take the thing off the list before they have to decide anything.

And when they try to do something to help, just tell them to lovingly sit down. You've got it.

I do this with recognition all the time, especially with clients and with friends who cannot take a compliment without immediately giving me one in return. I stop them.

"Can you just sit and receive that for a second? I don't need you to respond or give me anything back."

They're uncomfortable for about four seconds and then something in the body settles. Watch for it. You just healed them a little, gave them evidence they can receive. And they've probably never been allowed to feel that.

If you are on the other side of this, the one who organizes, your assignment is smaller and harder. Don't manufacture a test. Do not sit there next time hoping somebody shakes the bottle so you can find out where you stand. Just notice, when it happens, that it happened and tell them how much you appreciated that. It encourages good behavior and shows people how you want to be loved without having to explain it to them.

The high capacity woman rarely gets cared for but when you do, they're yours for life.

As a high capacity woman myself, I know how we hit the mileston then raise the bar, or we get handed something good and immediately start scanning for what else needs doing, and then we walk around genuinely convinced that nobody ever shows up for us.

Some of them are showing up.

Some of them are not, and you'll need to have a different conversation about that, but (and as someone who learned this lesson over the last year in a very difficult way), you cannot tell the two groups apart while you are still standing up, running the room. When you stop and step back, you'll see who steps up and who makes you the inconvenience because you're no longer playing the role that supported them.

I promise, you're not being dramatic or asking for too much. You were doing a job nobody named, in rooms that never had a way to see it, and you got so good at it that being off duty for one dinner felt like a foreign country.

But foreign didn't mean unwelcome. The second I stopped scanning for the job and let the celebration that night just happen for me, I understood this was the thing I had been quietly starving for, and how much smaller it was than I ever would have guessed.

It was not too much.

It was really fucking small.

A chair, a banner, a cheesecake I never had to order and people showing up for me.

Suddenly everyone who ever made being considered feel like a burden, like wanting it was asking for too much, were wrong. And I loved my friends even more who showed me consideration isn’t a burden, but a joy they’re giving.

The truth is, I didn’t want a bigger party.

I just wanted to sit down and receive… so I did.

Reply and tell me about the time somebody noticed without making you ask, what it felt like when they just handled it, or the thing you wish the people who love you already knew about how this feels for you if this sounds like you.

I want the real answer, and I think somebody else reading this needs to hear it too.

The Love Language Nobody Names

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