I was born without the sense of smell, and I could write for ages about whether this is a blessing in disguise or a weirdo’s curse. Here in Nepal, I am told the rivers smell absolutely awful when it hasn’t rained for a while, because of all the garbage that gets tossed in and rots in the stagnant black water. Of course this doesn’t affect me, beyond sometimes pitying a dead dog floating downstream after a flood while friends and relatives groan and pull their shirts over their noses.
At my old school, my folks and I made the wise‑or‑unwise decision to tell my classmates and teachers about it. My already somewhat strange reputation — a gardener and introvert who has never heard of Roblox and doesn’t watch reels — was crowned with another title. My close friends would teasingly wave the lunch delicacies at me (I call them delicacies for want of a better word for soggy, salty fried potatoes or stone-cold pizza) and joke that I couldn’t smell them, haw-haw, poor little me. These were my close friends, and I knew they would never intentionally hurt me, so I would laugh it off or make a mock attempt at tripping them up to change the subject. But after a while those comments began to burn, deep inside. At my new school I have said nothing about not being able to smell. However kind and empathetic a person is, our primal instincts read a disability as a weakness, and the human mind will try to single out the “weak” members of the herd to appear better than them, with the added bonus of a good laugh while doing it.
As a nature-lover, gardener and poultry-keeper of sorts, anosmia is quite a blow, because some of the pleasure is taken out of seeing your first painstakingly grown rose, sunflower, zinnia or marigold bloom. To us anosmic gardeners, ornamental flowers are grown to attract pollinators to our veggies, to add pleasant pops of colour, and I suppose to gain a bit of gardener-seemingness (“man, you haven’t grown flowers before? What kind of gardener are you?”). I am told the droppings from my backyard chickens do smell a bit in the compost pile, so that is one perk of cleaning out the hen run as an anosmic fellow.
I don’t think I taste my food any differently from anyone else. If I had been able to smell before, I could compare eating when you can smell your food with eating when you can’t — rather the opposite of the proverb. Not “you don’t know what you have till it’s gone,” but “you don’t know what you’re missing till you’ve had it,” and I think the latter is infinitely better. So that sums up my afternoon of discovering this anosmia awareness community, and now things return to my hens scratching in the garden, my homework piling up, mosquitoes whining in the evening light, and another bustling, busy school day tomorrow — all of it to go by without me thinking, worrying or caring about being anosmic at all.
— Raven
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