My sense of smell is neither very good nor is it very bad, in the traditional sense of the word. It is more like it is very sensitive. It’s like the smells I encounter just demand more of my attention then it does for others. You might know the feeling of meeting a friend, who just had a cigarette a moment ago, and how distracting such a smell can be of you are not used to smoking.
I used to smoke. In fact, I smoked most of my adult life and only quit about two years ago. I don’t particularly mind cigarette smoke even though I don’t smoke now, but I’ve heard many complain about how horrible the smell can be. It’s like a magnet, your full attention is pulled to the smell of the smoke.
Now imagine that it wasn’t just cigarette smoke that made you feel like that, but all smells you encounter every day. It could be coffee, freshly brewed in morning. It could be bread right out of the oven. Maybe the scent of the perfume that pretty girl on the bus always wears. It could be pizza from the pizza shop you always go to.
In these cases, it’s really not that bad, is it?
Unfortunately, life is not just freshly brewed coffee and pretty girls on buses. There’s that guy on the train who got up too late to shower. The stench of pee on the seat near you. Maybe someone brought food with them to eat on the way and, not only do they chew like it’s a competition, the smell is so strong you start worrying you’ll be sick before reaching the next stop.
When you get a late train home and the drunk people all stagger on, the smells are innumerable and more than unpleasant. I think, if people could properly smell themselves while drunk, we would all be too sick to keep any alcohol down. Luckily, my sense of smell gets numbed with the amount of alcohol I drink, but it’s hardly an effective way to survive the smells of the world.
Every smell is as intense and undeniable as if it was literally standing in front of me knocking on my head with a bat. It’s almost impossible to ignore, but your chances improve if you pass out.
It’s very difficult to converse casually with others while you are being attacked by several smells at all once. To be honest, some smells I’ve come to accept and ignore, while there are still some smells that I can hardly survive. I love the smell of rain, I love the smell of the ocean. I love freshly brewed coffee or matsutake mushrooms frying in butter. I like incense, especially white plum.
As a matter of fact, I burn incense quite regularly at home because it is relaxing when a lot of different smells bother me – the incense drowns out a lot of the bad smells that sometimes invades even the most secure homes.
Have you ever opened a window only to realise your neighbour is cooking something that smells like dead cat and then decided you best wait until later and promptly closed it to keep the smell out? Well, I don’t always have to open a window for the smells of my neighbour’s food to find its way into my home.
So, I guess that’s one way I can deal with my overly sensitive nose. Another, rather simple and yet to many I’ve met over the years, surprising solution is this: I always have strong menthol hard candy in my bag or pockets. The kind you use when you have caught a cold or influenza and can’t breathe because of snot and coughing. If I’m on a train or outside and the smells begin to become too extreme for me to handle, I get one of those menthol candies. It doesn’t remove all sense of smell, but it takes the top off and I can function on minimum level until I can escape whatever it is that smells so terrible.
The menthol hard candy revolutionised my life, I would say. Before, I could hardly travel or go anywhere without major meltdowns and getting sick, but this allows me to control the situation just enough to get through it.
It’s funny, isn’t it? The simplest little things can sometimes make the biggest differences.
I think we all know how smells can triggers memories, and to me, they always do. I see images as clearly as if they were happening around me once more. The smell of bread baking in the oven and in my mind’s eye I see one, specific image of a particular bread I once saw in the oven. The smell of one type of incense and I am instantly transported to a temple I once visited in Japan where that incense burned.
The smell of cigarette smoke and I see my grandmothers face – I can even hear her playing her piano. Of course, the same thing happens with bad memories and some smells I dislike simple because of the memories I have there.
To be honest it is not always easy for me to confront the negative memories, because the pain I feel is as intense and deep as if it was all happening again. I don’t mean that I remember it as such, it is so real to me it is as if I am reliving it again. Often, the pain stays with me long after the memory, just like if it really had happened again. Those things I won’t tell you about any time soon, but one day I hope to. I will tell you something else entirely, something that may help you understand just how much my sense of smell can affect my life in little ways.
My mother and father divorced when I was very little, and my father soon re-married and he is still with her today. She is the kindest woman, and I only remember how loving and compassionate a woman she was when I was little. They have five children and to me they will always be my younger siblings. I care for them as much as I would have if we had all grown up together. I hardly ever see them, and didn’t see them for many, many years as I was growing up.
My father became a butcher when he moved here, and my very first memories is from his butcher shop. I only remember good things from that place, but there is one thing I remember more than anything. The smell of a certain type of sausage my father would make in his shop. It is called sujuk, often known by the Turkish name sucuk. The smell of sujuk was so closely linked to my father that I could hardly separate the two when I was little, for a while after he disappeared from our life, I was even afraid he had turned into sujuk! Of course, he hadn’t, but I was a very little girl at the time. I simply refused to eat the breakfast my mother always loved to prepare, sujuk fried with eggs and flatbread. The smell made me feel like he was right there next to me, and I was too little to really understand what happened. All I knew was that he was there, and then he wasn’t. People bullied me a lot for being of mixed heritage as well, so I felt ashamed for missing my father.
Growing up I came to understand my parents and the choices they had to make better and I feel no pain when thinking about either of them or my siblings. I miss those who aren’t in my life in the way I would have preferred, but I understand why they are not.
Now, whenever I eat my sujuk breakfast I still feel like my father is right there next to me, and for some odd reason I feel comforted. You see, I don’t feel like my past is unchangeable, even if it seems silly to think so. To me it feels like my past changed the day I forgave what happened, and my sad and painful memories that I was forced to re-live every time I smelled sujuk, became something else entirely. It is now something I dearly treasure.
As you can see, my sensitivity can both seem like a gift and a curse. In a way, my hypersensitivity in general is like this – it has its good aspects and its bad aspects. But then, life is generally like that and we have to take the bad with the good. The good is always worth it.
The first article I wrote about this is called Hypersensitivity, and in case you want to know more about this topic, it’s a great place to start. You can also just skip to any of the other senses, which are: Sight, Hearing, Touch or Taste.
