Can We Talk About Smells for a Second?

The private reality of being the only person who can smell something and how to not let it keep ruining your life.

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Do you smell that?

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that happens when you’re sitting in a meeting, or at dinner with family, or on a first date, and something smells wrong.

Not a little off. Not mildly unpleasant. F-ing unbearable.

Wrong in a way that is taking up 40% of your cognitive bandwidth.

And you look around, and everyone is just... fine. Talking. Laughing. Passing the bread. Acting as if the air itself isn’t doing something genuinely alarming.

So you do the thing you’ve spent a lifetime perfecting:

You act like nothing is happening, cover your nose, exit the room, or worse.

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First, Let’s Name What’s Actually Going On

If you’re neurocomplex, your relationship with smell is probably not casual. It’s not a background sense. It’s foreground. All the time.

You might recognize yourself in some of these: