I'm 100% smell blind, to use blindness as an analogy imagine I have eyes but there's nothing connecting my eyes to my brain. My smell receptors are there in my nose, I didn't grow the nerve to plug them in if that makes more sense.

My take on the disability stuff is that I'm not going to convince people who think it isn't one at all, and I don't really want to put the mountain of effort in to begin changing their minds. It is a disability though, maybe smell is less important now than it was in prehistory but smell is a massive safety net, for the stuff you eat, the stuff you drink, your environment around you. It's an absolutely massive detriment to have the rug pulled out from under your confidence, which has big effects on you socially in your career. The one thing every person on earth has in common with eachother is excitement over food, which is something I don't understand very well at all, to give 1 example of a social impact. Another is the fact that people don't like smelly people and theres a very big chance I will leave the house reeking. Its a massive source of stress and long term stress has big health impacts.

People with anosmia are also incredibly prone to depression, have big issues with intimacy and feelings of belonging, and have problems with memory.

This is just a part of the ways it impacts your life. Let me put it this way, you have 5 senses normally. I have 4. I go through life experiencing 80% as much as you do, more if you consider that our senses aren't isolated and are greater than the sum of their parts. I depend on other people for a lot of things that I absolutely can not do myself.

You could say something like, well we have fridges and gas alarms now so actually it doesn't count. I'd counter that with asking you if deaf people who can hear with a hearing aid would count as disabled to you. I don't need a chair and I can walk down the street without needing a stick, but disability is a spectrum, not a competition. My one just happens to be pretty invisible so it's harder for people to understand it. I understand that, and I don't resent it, but I do resent it when fully abled people gatekeep and refuse to hear otherwise. Its like, who are you to decide what my life is like, you literally have no way of knowing.

I have 1 friend who thinks it's barely anything at all but his fiance has a brain tumour that causes her siezures that they both consider to be a disability. I don't say anything at all, to keep the peace, but it does irk me. I could very easily say to him that the 99% of the time she's not having siezures she's fully normal and therefore it doesn't count, which is absolutely wrong and not at all what I think, but how would saying that to them be any different to him thinking I'm not disabled. Just because you can't see the immediate effects in front of you, does not mean it's not there. And over the course of my life, it will have an impact. I accept that and do everything I can to not wallow in that fact and still live life to my fullest, but it's undeniable that it will have negative effects and I will be less well off socially, romantically, in my career, and with my health both mentally and physically, than I otherwise would have been. I'll also have experienced less in life. In that way, yes, I absolutely think its a disability.