odmo
New Member
Hi all, curious if anyone else shares a similar sensory response as me, and how they have learned to cope with it. There are several smells that I view as being incredibly dry. Some examples are kleenax tissues, dirt, wood, and air conditioning, but also seemingly unrelated things like the after-smell of a rainstorm (even though that is very wet!). There are countless others, all things that have a very standard 'dry' sense to them. Perhaps the strange one is wind, but maybe that is just caused by a mix of the surroundings and a sensory overload. Here is my difficulty, and has been my entire life. Whenever I smell this dryness, I cannot breathe. It absolutely hinders my ability to take in any air, as the dryness seems to block my ability to process any of the surrounding air. Incredibly hard to describe. I have to relax into taking sporadic breaths, learning the environment, and how I can regulate the dryness/breathing dynamic. If I am with others, and have to talk at the same time, this is an incredibly hard feat. It leads me to cutting off my words mid-speech, and playing a very difficult dance. I think this can be jarring for people to see, but I have also become tremendously good at hiding this whole thing. It is only after recently seeing someone professionally that I had thought anything of this, as I assumed it was the case for everyone. The only thing that I have been using to overcome the no-breathing-whatsoever is to completely accept the smell and learn the dry qualities to it. For example, forcing myself to breathe through a kleenax. However, while I can step into a regular breathing pattern, the dry quality never leaves, and the breathing is never comfortable.
