#and I just no no one else who is a congenital anosmic

[submitwittyblognamehere]

I know you mentioned it ages agonon someone elses post but i kept forgetting to ask you about it so likw. Can you expand on the no sense of smell/impacting taste because i ALSO have pretty much no sense of taste (i can smell alcohol/fuel. And sometimes metallic scents. And uh. artificial strawberry. And like thats it). And ive never questioned it much but im curious about how it affects other people cause like. Ive fully drank spoiled milk TWICE before and god can i taste it even if i cant smell it lmao. Also so much stuff tastes bland to me its so boring.

Yeah, I'll share! Hearing other people's experience (or lack thereof) of smell and taste is always really interesting to me, and I always have lots of my own stories about it to share loll.

My dad is the only other anosmic I know (and his isn't congenital), so all of these experiences are based solely on my own. I have no idea what other people's experiences of anosmia are besides what little I've been able to find online, and COVID has made finding sources about congenital anosmics even harder.

In my experience, not being able to smell goes like this (long post RIP sorry):

I am consistently caught unaware of things. Food in the dining hall at school isn't great tonight? I don't know until I go to try it. People are smoking across the hall? Oh so that's why I have a headache. My brother suddenly gets excited that the dinner our parents are cooking is his favorite. We are no where near the kitchen, and I am clueless about what it is.

Usually it isn't a distressing thing, but it can be. We had a gas leak at the home I grew up in once when I was a kid, just a small thing and it was fixed right away but until my mom rushed to get us out of the house I was totally unaware of it.

I never really thought it affected my sense of taste too much until a couple of years ago, because independently I feel like I have a pretty wide range of tastes that I can tell apart. But then my brother and I did a soda blind taste test and well... I got every single one wrong (and I had just made such a big show of preferring the taste of ginger ale over all others, and despising lemon-lime flavored ones).

"Dark sodas taste so much more acidic than non-dark ones, and they're so syrup-y, too!"

For my sense of taste, I've realized that I rely on texture to an insane degree. Most artificially fruit flavored things taste almost absolutely the same. Sour. Sweet. Citrus-y. If jolly ranchers and dum-dums weren't different colors I wouldn't know they were different flavors. It also wasn't until relatively recently that I realized herbs and spices are supposed to taste/smell differently, too! I legitimately thought that stuff like cilantro, basil, thyme, oregano, etc. was all just... green and leafy? And that the people who could tell the difference were either A. being pretentious and exaggerating or making it up, or B. had just really delicate palettes like high end trained chefs and what not.

Its funny you bring up that post I responded to before, actually, because I've been thinking about it again recently and may have realized that I don't actually know what meat tastes like either? Or more that I just... can't tell what its supposed to taste like. Obviously they have much different textures which are a dead give away.. but based on plain taste alone, I think that I'd have a lot of trouble recognizing them or distinguishing them apart from one another. Aside from maybe fish? But I guess it depends on what kind.

Another example of textures: a local ice cream stand near me stopped selling my favorite flavor (with lots of chunks and chocolate and nuts), I really don't enjoy eating anything from there as much anymore. Its all just.. boring now? Its good once in a while but all of the other flavors all feel the same to eat and there's hardly any variation anymore since I can't compare to the super textured one (RIP my lack of smell and my adhd brain).

God this has gotten so long so I'll stop here, I just.. had a lot to share I guess lmao. There's a lot of dimensions to having a lack of smell which vary in impact and levels of distress, but usually I just try to joke about it when there's a relevant moment? I've had several conversations about it with my friends, and they all end with everyone being bewildered.