Overreactions to freakiness on a large scale

What makes me just so special is I have congenital anosmia. For about twelve years, I was just the kid who couldn’t smell, and I only found out recently that my parents didn’t even believe me till we went to stay on a farm in birthing season (I was ten): no one but me and the farmer dared venture into the birthing shed because there was apparently a hideous stench from rotting placentas and so forth. Anyway, often people don’t believe me when I tell them, and I’m often asked ‘how do you know?’ I used to get upset by this, and I still do, but now I hide it better – I mean, would they ask a blind person how they knew they couldn’t see? People laugh at that. I know it’s not the same thing, but smelling is a sense, and it’s one I don’t have, and anosmia is a disability, just like blindness or deafness (which is a topic for an up and coming post, actually, is deafness), and it’s upsetting when people laugh at me or mock me.

So anyway, one day last year I was bored on the computer and I started looking stuff up, as you do, and I found out that ‘not smelling’ had a name: anosmia. And I found a website all about it, and I discovered that the majority of people who have no sense of smell lost it as they grew up, and that it’s very very rare to be missing it from birth – but it’s possible. It happens. And I started crying.

If you’re blind, you know about it. People don’t ask you why, or how you know for sure, because the doctors tell you. In fact, I just found this:

“As a child without a sense of smell, it requires a considerable amount of thought to determine that something is missing. Blind children are told they can’t see, but anosmic children have to find a way to work it out for themselves.”

That’s what I mean. And I was so amazed to understand it wasn’t just me, to know it wasn’t my imagination, to hear other people talking about things I’d always assumed I was a freak for feeling, that yeah, I started crying. In fact, a year later, looking at the line “These patients often do not understand the concept of an odour,” I still feel choky. Because I still don’t.

Ok, so honestly, this is completely going somewhere – I just got distracted by almost crying over the website again. Where it is going is here.

A while ago, can’t remember whether it was before or after I got in with the mental health services but probably before, I was doing a bit of Wiki-hopping from link to link to link and I found that article about depersonalisation. Now, by this point, I’d been stepping out of myself pretty regularly, watching my body sitting in lessons from a point somewhere up by the ceiling, feeling like the girl who controlled my body at these times was standing behind me and waiting when I was the one living behind my eyes, and I was feeling less connected to the world every time someone spoke to me and I had to fight to hear what they saying because I was so far away. It was hard holding conversations because sometimes I’d come back in the middle of one and have no real idea what I’d been talking about, and if I was in the middle of a sentence I wouldn’t realise and I’d just walk off. I’m not saying it was a separate person; I’m just saying it was a different part of me. At least it felt that way.

So naturally, when I found that article on Wikipedia, I almost started crying again because this was me. This article said that how I was living and acting and seeing the world was valid. I wasn’t crazy – or if I was, I wasn’t the only one. I didn’t cry, but that was because I was in school at the time and there were a bunch of Year 7s rolling around and shrieking in wheely chairs behind me. It meant a lot, though. It was probably a big reason behind my breaking down and confessing in the doctor’s room a couple of weeks later, because now I had an idea it wasn’t all that normal.

It’s like not being able to smell. I didn’t realise I wasn’t normal till I realised I wasn’t alone.

 

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