As quite a few of you know already, I do not possess a sense of smell. I do not have any recollections of smelling anything, no memory of it. My mom swears I reacted to smells when I was a toddler, but at age 2 or 3 I got an ear infection, and then an infection on a bone in my ear, and apparently I lost the sense of smell somewhere around that time.

Nobody ever found out, because I had no idea what the hell I was missing. I just pretended, what the hell did I know? If somebody farted, I said ‘ewww’ like everybody else. And for some reason, it just didn’t come up. I had lots of colds as a kid, so everyone just assumed I was having a cold at the time when I didn’t respond to any smells or said I didn’t smell anything.

What stands out to me most is when I was eleven of something. My neighbour friend Eveline and I were walking down the stairs in my house and Eveline said: “You’re eating brocolli tonight.”
And I wondered how the hell she knew. She gave me a weird look. “Your mom is cooking it. Can’t you smell it, then?”
I didn’t. And that’s when I kind of realized.

I don’t know how it came up, or whatever, but at some point we saw a doctor about it, who said he couldn’t really do anything about it. And that’s basically my story.

People always ask me if I can’t taste, either. But I can. Or at least I think I do; what the hell do I know? I know what kinds of food I like and dislike, I’m a sucker for sweet stuff. But I can’t distinguish whether you’re serving me strawberry tea or orange tea, for example. That’s mostly smell-based, apparently. Blindfold me and give me an orange or strawberry and HELL YES I know what I’m tasting. (Oh and btw, I’ve sniffed ammonia once, after Olli dared me to in biology class when I was fifteen. And it made me fall off my chair as if I got punched in the face. Just so you know)

It never particularly bothered me. It’s even been handy in some (smelly) cases, where I could clean out places that had other people gagging and throwing up. Festivals are a whole lot less unpleasant for me because I’m not bothered by the smell of beer, piss, and sweat. Port-a-potties are disgusting because they’re filthy, but not because they smell. I always glossed over the part where it’s dangerous - leaving the gas on, checking whether you’re not burning your food, being careful about spoilt food, and so on, and so on.

Tonight I googled the affliction for the first time in my life. It has a name. Anosmia.
And when I read this particular quote…

“Often people who have congenital anosmia report that they pretended to be able to smell as children because they thought that smelling was something that older/mature people could do, or did not understand the concept of smelling but did not want to appear different from others. When children get older, they often realize and report to their parents that they do not actually possess a sense of smell, often, to the surprise of their parents.”

It nearly made me cry. Because it IS the story of my life. And suddenly it made me really sad. I’m missing out on so much, and I’ll never even know the smell of freshly baked bread, of rain coming, of coffee, the ocean, or even the smell of my house and my husband. I’ll never know.
I don’t really want to ask for attention about this, which is maybe why I’ve never made a big deal out of it.
It’s just tonight for the first time in my life, that I think this really fucking sucks.