Recent events have gotten me thinking about my various health anomalies, the rarest of which is my congenital anosmia.
As far as I can ascertain, I was born without a sense of smell, probably because of something wrong with my olfactory nerve. Most anosmics have an “acquired” condition, meaning something happened to them in life that eroded their olfactory receptors, severed the olfactory nerve, or damaged the smelling center of the brain, but I can reasonably deduce that I have always lacked the capacity to smell. I remember when I was too young to read books with words in them, my mother would sit down and we would flip through scratch-and-sniff books. She would point at the colorful pads and tell me to rub them with my finger before inhaling deeply. I went along with it, mostly because I thought scent was just a cross between color and texture.
Growing up, I continued to believe that smell was simply a way to describe combined sensory properties, like taste plus consistency, or subjective attractiveness. Farts were a much funnier joke to me without the negative side effects, and it seemed for the most part that people complained about bad smells more than they remarked on the pleasant ones. Most recently, I thought smell was a description of warmth and humidity. I believe this concept comes from the association of smell with the nose and my nose’s high sensitivity to changing moisture levels. I believed that “bad” smells were just damp things and “good” smells were dry, based on the association of poop and garbage bags with stink.
After that passed, and I came to terms with my condition, a lot of things make sense. I have no appreciation for fine food, since I miss out on the subtleties of seasonings and the supposedly pleasing contrasts that chefs seek to create. I taste salt, sugar, acids and bases only to the simplest level. Spices like rosemary or garlic have no impact on what I taste, and to this day I can’t understand the difference between garlic bread and buttered toast. I also have no concept of the olfactory horror my family experienced when my dog came home doused in skunk spray (twice in one night, I might add). While my parents rushed to cover their faces, and my dog wretched and gagged in disgust, I just looked on and wondered what the commotion was about.
So those are relatively harmless things. Sure, I eat a lot of salt, sugar, and fat because quality food is unpleasant to me, and I miss out on being nauseated by skunks, but those don’t seem that bad to me.
The problem with anosmia is that basically no one else has it. I tell people that I can’t smell, and the response (for some reason) is almost always “oh yeah, I have a really bad sense of smell too”. Then there’s a Flight of the Conchords exchange like:
“No, I can’t smell at all.”
“Yeah, neither can I, unless the smell is really strong or its a dead thing or spoiled milk or yard trimmings or my brother’s gym shoes or cigarette smoke.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I can’t smell anything at all.”
“Right, I get that when I have a cold, too.”
“I don’t have a cold, I’m anosmic.”
“But that’s because your nose is congested.”
“No, it’s because my olfactory nerve doesn’t connect my nose to my brain.”
“Oh, so you’re saying if there something really strong, you could smell it?”
“What? No! I can’t smell anything!”
“What about a really bad fart?”
“You know what? Sure. Smelling a really bad fart would definitely cure anosmia, just like staring into the sun cures blindness. You’re a medical genius.”
“I knew it!”
And that minor annoyance keeps the anosmic community from finding each other or finding out that there’s a name to the condition. People dismiss anosmia as a non-issue because our world is built primarily around sight and sound. Blindness and deafness are a big deal in this society because the lifelong inability to see or hear changes your entire life, but anosmia is looked at as almost a joke.
The truth is, anosmia sucks. Being congenital, I have no idea what I’m missing, but I really feel for the people who lost their smell to nasal sprays, cancer, or strong punches to the forehead. I’ve had my whole life to work around and understand the issue, but some people are simply thrust into it, and I can sympathize with them.
The worst part of a scentless world is trying to grasp the importance of these invisible particles that people feel so strongly about. Safety systems like sulfured gas and food preservatives rely almost entirely on smell, for starters. I don’t feel safe around gas stoves knowing that I would never be alerted to an unlit burner. Then there’s the more sentimental element. People talk about the smells of their loved ones or their favorite places like it’s an all-encompassing atmosphere unique to a memory, but I make no such connections. I won’t experience any of the joy described by people smelling a rose garden or an elaborate meal, I won’t remember my grandparents by their aroma or my dogs by the scents they leave in their beds. All this, and I don’t know whether or not it’s important, because I have no frame of reference to base it on.
Then there’s the unknowing. The feeling that there could be a smell on me that gives away my secrets or implicates me in something I didn’t do. If my friends smoked pot and brushed against me, would my parents think I was smoking? If I spent time in a bar without drinking, and got pulled over, would the officer smell liquor on me? Do I need to be using deodorant even though I generally don’t sweat? This problem is exacerbated by long bouts of chronic constipation which leave me in long-term physical pain as well as the mental anxiety of trying to figure out if people can smell the filth brewing in my bowels. Further still, I never know when things are clean; I change my shirt every day for fear that someone could detect a repeat use. When I do laundry in a public machine, I can’t tell if the soap dispensed or spread properly, or if it was enough to remove my “mark” from the fabric. I once ordered a watch on eBay much to the dismay of my family, as it reeked so strongly of smoke that I had to keep it outside for a day before they would let me bring it inside, yet I would have had no idea if I had put it on and worn it out the door. I wonder if people can smell sex on people the way they describe it in movies and on TV, or if semen reeks of guilt. I spend a lot of time wondering if I’m just that guy who goes to a job interview not knowing there’s a dick drawn on his forehead, but there’s nothing I can do except ask.
I know there are groups out there for anosmics to communicate, but my purpose here was to document myself in long format. Some day, hopefully, someone will search for an article on anosmia, read this, and feel like they’ve gained some insight into the importance of smell, or their own smell-less world. In the end, it’s not like being blind or deaf, but that doesn’t mean a support network can’t help, and if I get one less person saying “but can you smell my dead cat?” then I think I’ve served my purpose.
That’s a pretty sad purpose, isn’t it.
Profanity Filter Testing Domain 