Kristina Bekher/UnsplashIn the winter of 1994, I stayed with my grandmother for a couple of weeks while my aunt, her full-time carer, was travelling. It wasn’t an imposition. I’d lived with my grandparents until I was eight years old, so to be back in that dim but beloved house was like revisiting my childhood. At the end of each night, in peak grandmother-mode, my gran would send me off to bed with a hand-crocheted blanket and a cup of hot chocolate. A week or so into my stay, I woke up feeling dreadful. My head was pounding, my gut was roiling and I felt as if I’d barely slept. Although I was in my mid-twenties, this wasn’t a hangover. The highlights of the previous night had been watching Murder, She Wrote and that cup of hot chocolate. In the kitchen, Gran looked similarly secondhand as she drooped over the newspaper crossword, black smudges of exhaustion visible behind her glasses. She offered to make me a coffee, but I waved her back to her chair. My regular hit of long black was the last thing I wanted with my queasy gut and fussing with my stovetop percolator felt like too much effort. A cup of tea was about all I had the stomach or energy for. And (tea-drinkers of the world forgive me), I slung a teabag into a mug of cold water and shoved it in the microwave.The doorbell rang. My boyfriend was on the doorstep, ready to collect me for work. As I swung open the heavy front door, he took a single breath and yanked me away from the house. Then he dashed back inside. Seconds later, he was hustling my dressing-gowned gran to join me on the footpath. The previous night, after making me that cup of hot chocolate, Gran had accidentally left the stove on. All through the small hours, gas seeped into every room. When I opened the front door to greet my new love, a wave of vapour billowed out, the smell overpowering his nose. Had I not been so dazed and debilitated by the fumes, it’s likely I would have made myself a coffee – and at the moment of stovetop ignition, killed myself and my grandmother in a Michael Bay-worthy suburban explosion. That lazy cup of microwaved tea saved both our lives. Rachael Mead in the arms of the grandmother who shares her inability to smell, alongside Rachael’s aunt. Author supplied Anosmia: an inability to smellMy gran and I shared something else besides a love of hot chocolate. Neither of us could smell the gas filling the house. We have congenital anosmia; neither of us have ever had a sense of smell. Anosmia is far more common than most people think. Anosmia and hyposmia, the inability or decreased ability to smell, is estimated to afflict between 3% and 20% of the population, including loss of smell from either a brain injury or a nasal condition. Or, like Gran and me, they are anosmic from birth. When it comes to sensory deficit, anosmia can’t compete with being blind or deaf. Yet in many ways, smell is a fundamental element of the human experience. As my gran and I can attest, to live without a sense of smell is dangerous. Smoke, gas and spoiled food are all undetectable to people like us, which poses obvious risks to our safety.But beyond that, smell is vital to quality of life. So much of the succulence of human experience comes to us through scent. The senses of smell and taste are so intertwined that losing the ability to smell seriously diminishes your appreciation of food and drink. While our taste buds still detect the basic distinctions between foods that are salty, sweet, bitter or sour, the enormous variety and subtlety of flavours and aromas that come to us through airborne, volatile chemical particles are lost when we lose the ability to smell. For those born with a sense of smell, only to lose it, the impact is severe. Loss of smell is associated with substantially increased rates of depression, anxiety and reduced quality of life. Over the long term, people who can no longer smell face challenges with loneliness, maintaining personal hygiene and social relationships. But one of the saddest aspects of losing your sense of smell is losing your connection to the profound array of memories and associations that can be triggered by scent. Helen Keller, the deaf and blind author and political activist, said “smell [is] a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived”. This curious association between scent and memory has a physiological basis. Within the brain, sight and sound are processed by the neocortex, while smell is processed by the limbic system: an ancient structure that also deals with memory and emotion. This explains why smell can so formidably awaken emotional memories. Think of Proust’s famous scene in Swann’s Way, dipping his madeleine into a cup of tea and the scent of it immediately transporting him back to his childhood. Whenever this now common literary device is used, I must admit to feeling a touch of melancholy. Proust’s story will never land for me the way it does for other readers, and it makes me aware of the shortcut to memory and nostalgia that will always remain a hidden path.I live in the Adelaide Hills and when I began writing poetry, my early work focused on the beauty of the natural world. Yet there was always something missing; my poems felt more like postcards of landscapes than three-dimensional ecosystems. Finally, the penny dropped. I was perceiving my surroundings and trying to write about them based on only two of the five senses: sight and hearing. In many ways, reading about the fragrant elements of the world makes me feel like an anthropologist studying a different culture, or a traveller reading a guide to a country I’ve never visited. Rachael Mead’s poetry focuses on the beauty of the natural world. Author supplied When the pandemic hit in 2020, millions of people entered the sensory world I’d inhabited my entire life: smell and taste dysfunction were common symptoms of COVID-19. A 2022 report that synthesised data from a range of published studies, found 12.2% of study participants still experienced a complete loss of smell more than three months after infection.Our limbic system’s role in processing smell, as well as memory and emotion, means loss of smell and taste has consequences far beyond sensory deficit. Our emotional lives – our ability to experience fear and pleasure, hunger and sex – are closely entwined with our ability to smell and taste.Before the pandemic, anosmia was seen as a quality of life issue, rather than a serious sensory deficit. This changed when millions of people began losing their sense of smell. People with post-viral anosmia are clearly suffering, as they struggle with the loss of a world they once inhabited. But for me, anosmia is not about loss. I can’t mourn something I’ve never known. ‘Scent just didn’t exist’I wasn’t always aware that I couldn’t smell. In my world, scent just didn’t exist. Growing up at my grandparents’, I was the only child in a house packed with adults. It was puzzling, but I assumed that “smelling things” was something only adults could do, like reading or holding a glass with one hand. I expected to be able to do it when I got bigger. By the time I went to school and realised my peers already possessed this mysterious ability, my family told me not to worry – Gran can’t do it either. In my house, not being able to smell wasn’t anything special or wrong. In fact, it was so unremarkable, no one remembered. Gran and I were constantly asked to sniff new perfumes and judge suspect milk in the fridge. Gran would lower her nose over the proffered wrist or milk bottle as if she could detect their odours and I began to do the same, rather than constantly remind people of my difference. My understanding of what it feels like to smell is a work of imagination, entirely based on secondhand perceptions gleaned from books and on questioning family and friends. It creates a sense of otherworldliness, which was amplified when I first encountered Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses in 2015. This lyrical exploration of the human senses upends the usual hierarchy of sight and sound, positioning smell as central to human experience. Ackerman speaks of breath as the source of human life – and smell, therefore, as the consequence of every inhalation passing through our bodies. Until reading Ackerman, I’d never thought about the language we use to describe the olfactory world, or why the language of scent had never moved me. While I understood the meaning of the words, the ideas they contained failed to connect with my experience. The words elicited a cerebral understanding, but held no emotional or perceptual weight. According to Ackerman, while scent is fundamental to human experience, our language struggles when faced with the task of describing it. Smell is subjective, which means the information it provides is difficult to communicate. As philosopher Immanuel Kant says, to someone who lacks a sense of smell, this kind of sensation cannot be communicated; and, even if he does not lack this sense, one still cannot be sure that he has exactly the same sensation from a flower than we have from it. Think of a smell you love – and try to describe it, without using another scent as a point of comparison. How would you explain the aroma of a campfire, the smell of an op shop or the scent of perfume to someone like me, without a sense of smell? Our instinct is to use words such as smoky, mothballs, fruity – words that rely on taste and smell as references. Adjectives like “intoxicating” or “revolting” move into the emotional territory of smell. As I read Ackerman, I finally understood that my body doesn’t “know” the words from the language of scent. Smell is a mute sense, almost mystical, understood with our bodies and emotions rather than our language. As Ackerman says, In a world sayable and lush, where marvels offer themselves up readily for verbal dissection, smells are often right on the tips of our tongues – but no closer – and it gives them a kind of magical distance, a mystery, a power without name, a sacredness.No wonder I felt like an anthropologist. Literary scents and feeling aloneThis feeling of distance from the rest of humanity was exacerbated with the international success of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume (1985). I was 30 when I read it. The opening page didn’t just reinforce my outsider feelings; it made me feel overwhelmed – and a little sympathetically nauseated. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat […] People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.I remember lowering the book in shock. Was this how other people moved through the world – assaulted by scent with every step? For me, this exotic novel was the equivalent of reading science fiction. Not because of the visceral scent descriptions – their effect was lost on me – but because they made me feel like a stranger in my own world. Every odour was plainspoken, while conveying great intensity: a scent-scape designed for maximum effect. No metaphor or simile was needed; every smell was chosen for its effect and immediate accessibility. Except to me. I cannot think of a time reading made me feel more intensely alone. Süskind created a world defined by smell, inhabited by someone so removed from my experience he could be an alien. The central character, Grenouille, is not only hyperosmic – a person possessed by an unnaturally acute sense of smell – but his body has no odour.In many ways, Grenouille was the binary opposite of me – someone superpowered where I am powerless. But to have no personal scent is especially alien for anosmic people. When you can’t smell yourself, fear of your personal scent being repugnant to others is a serious and constant source of anxiety. Sweat, body odour, bad breath, menstruation or the opposite problem of unwitting overcompensation with too much perfume, cologne or scented body products – anosmic people confront these worries every day. It’s one of the reasons we are susceptible to anxiety disorders and becoming socially isolated. *(https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12302507) *It’s interesting to me that while much of my understanding of smell comes from reading, when I began researching anosmia, I failed to find a single novel with a protagonist who is congenitally anosmic. Invisible in life, invisible in literature. The only book I unearthed is A World Without Smells (2017) by Lars Lundqvist, a self-published work of nonfiction translated from Swedish.This is an exceptionally plainspoken piece of life writing (although perhaps the style is a consequence of the translation process). A congenitally anosmic man in his mid-fifties, left alone for a weekend without wife or family, notices what is missing from his day: his wife’s habitual comments about the house smells. Aged 57, it dawns on him that no one in his life truly understands the way he perceives the world. As someone who has never been able to smell, he is totally ignorant about the invisible world that surrounds him, cut off from an entire dimension everyone else is experiencing. He is utterly alone. Lundqvist began to research and compile this informative book with the simple intention of learning about his disability, describing his experience of anosmia, and finding others just like him. He walks readers through his perception of the world, beginning with a step-by-step experience of his day, noting all the places where those around him mention the olfactory world to which he is oblivious. Like me, I notice, he is highly reliant on his partner to tell him about spoiled food, stuffy atmosphere and animal smells. Unlike me, the author felt incredibly isolated until finding a Facebook group for congenital anosmics. He writes:“Wow! Others like me! Finally! People who understand what it is like to be anosmic!”“I am not alone!”Difference and isolationI was lucky to be raised within a family familiar with my sensory deficit. For the first 50 years of my life, my condition was obscure. The only other anosmic person I’d met was my grandmother. Then COVID-19 hit the world and almost overnight, everyone knew someone who couldn’t smell. Anosmia shifted from invisibility to the limelight. Now that the pandemic has receded and anosmia is among a raft of symptoms suffered by those with long-COVID, we are longer invisible. But the psychological effect of losing smell is the focus of research and concern. For those of us who could never smell, the psychological effect is different; it’s our sense of difference and isolation. Many of us prefer to remain invisible. To reveal our difference is a choice: an act of trust. Unless we actively seek out community, we remain solo residents within our sensory universe. Until now, I have mostly hidden my anosmia. When I do choose to take someone into my confidence, the common reaction is to say, “lucky you”. To be honest, this does my head in. It’s so flippant, the person usually joking about how I don’t have to smell my husband’s farts and how lucky he is to have the freedom to let rip whenever the urge hits him. No one would ever tell a blind or deaf person they are lucky. Of course, they have a point. If I pass a decomposing animal on the side of the road when I’m out walking, I’m not repulsed. I’m sad for the animal – and death makes me conscious of my own mortality, just as it does for everyone else. But the absence of smell allows me to react quite differently to the process of decomposition. Rather than disgust, I find the physical reality of death curious, sometimes even beautiful. I’m able to see it, clearly and at close quarters, as the recycling of matter into the earth, the first law of thermodynamics in motion. Many years ago, as a tourist in Morocco, my husband and I visited the ancient leather tanning pits of Fès, which are in the middle of a bustling, open-air souq. The centuries-old tanning process includes using cow urine to soften the hides and pigeon guano to prepare the leather for dyeing. It was a fascinating place and our slow pace meant we were overtaken by several tour groups. At one point, I stepped back to yield the narrow path to a group of tourists, and they stared at me with genuinely horrified expressions, bunches of mint mashed against their noses. I smiled and gestured for them to pass, which they did, skirting me as if I was afflicted with an infectious disease. It wasn’t until I stepped back onto the walkway that I noticed I’d unwittingly backed up against a pyramid of skinned and rotting cow and goat heads. From the other tourists’ perspective, my smile and genuine lack of concern must have seemed almost supernatural. Rachael was unconcerned when she backed into a pyramid of skinned and rotting cow and goat heads in Morocco. Author supplied Food without smellThe next most common question I’m asked is about my appreciation of food. Friends are initially sympathetic, but this swiftly morphs into horror when they realise they wasted truffles and an expensive Shiraz on me at their last dinner party. I can taste the basic distinctions of sweet, sour, bitter and salt, as well as umami. And I receive input from the trigeminal nerve, which has receptors all over my tongue, allowing me to sense temperature and texture. But when I’m in charge in the kitchen, I tend to overdo the salt and the chilli: strong flavours have the most effect on me. I can happily eat salt and chilli until the surface of my tongue burns. Foods I enjoy are often unpalatable to others. It’s a credit to the power of attraction that my husband is still with me after eating the first meal I ever cooked for him: a stir fry so heavy handed with soy sauce, he found it almost inedible. He does most of the cooking in our household, since though I can follow a recipe, I’m incapable of seasoning dishes with any subtlety, nor sensing when they start to burn. Rachael’s husband does most of the cooking: she can’t season dishes well, nor sense when they’re burning. Author supplied Regardless of how people respond when they learn about my anosmia, the most common reaction is to immediately forget – just like my family. My favourite roses are Mr. Lincoln and Papa Meilland: I love them for the rich claret of their petals. But whenever my mother sees a rose, without fail, she will shove it under my nose. Doesn’t it smell divine? It’s frustrating, but she’s not being intentionally thoughtless or cruel. Anosmia is invisible – and I’m exceptionally skilled at passing as someone with five functional senses.Masking my differenceMy ability to mask has become so smooth, it’s unconscious. But I don’t feel as if my world is impoverished; I feel complete. My sense of lacking something is entirely based on how much other people appear to appreciate the olfactory dimension of their world. The history of aesthetics is rife with philosophers talking about sight and sound as the intellectual senses, dismissing taste, touch and smell as too tied to biological needs like hunger, thirst, fear and desire.It all goes back to that old chestnut of the mind–body split. According to Kant and Georg W.F. Hegel, sight and hearing are the senses of cerebral life; bound to knowledge, communication and imagination. Smell, taste and touch were deemed overly subjective; instead of opening us out to the world, they close us in with visceral sensations.This became clear to me at a poetry workshop where the class was asked to think of a favourite place from our past, then describe it through writing one stanza for each of the senses. I finished before everyone else. The man sitting next to me leaned over, whispering I’d forgotten the stanza on smell. I had two options. Be true to my own reality and leave the poem at four stanzas, or use my imagination. I was so adept at passing as a normal person, I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. Firing up my powers of mimicry and invention, I waxed lyrical about the briny tang on the air from the silverside bubbling on Gran’s woodstove and her lanolin-scented fingers from knitting. The success of that scent-laden poem turned me into a liar. It was my light bulb moment – readers respond to sensory detail; to omit scent reduces the effect and perceived sense of place held within the poem. Should I remain true to my experience, or write poems designed to be read? I chose the latter. My poems were now pungent with scents and rich with taste – all complete inventions. Friends and relatives found themselves on the end of interrogations about tastes and smells. My husband is so used to me harassing him to describe scentscapes that he does it automatically, wherever we go. But these poems are entirely based on secondhand perceptions. They don’t reflect my reality. They are not authentic translations. They are a mask.A world less fragrant – and less fetidThirty years after that cup of microwaved tea, I am still alive. The gorgeous new boyfriend is now my husband and while my gran is no longer here, her passing was not in any way linked to the hazards of anosmia. My olfactory disability does not define me, just as it did not define my Gran. And yet I can’t deny its effect on my perception of reality. Some might say my world is a poorer one: a two-dimensional existence in a three-dimensional reality. Analogue to your digital. That’s not how I experience it. Not being attuned to this mystery called scent, my world is simpler than yours and a little more dangerous; not as fragrant, but also not as fetid. And while I’m content within it, I still slip the scent of eucalyptus or the lanolin of Gran’s knitting into my poems. And when my mother offers me a rose, I still touch my nose to its softness and inhale.Rachael Mead does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.