Imagine something as basic as hearing or breathing or sleeping being an excruciating experience. Every slight footstep in the distance sounds like cymbals crashing in your ear. Inhaling feels alien and panic-inducing. Getting a night’s sleep in your own bed is more traumatic than anything that could happen in the outside world all day.

Then imagine that doctors tell you that there isn’t, in fact, anything wrong with you, and certainly not anything that they can make go away. It’s all in your head. This doesn’t make the excruciating experience feel any better, though; Now, in addition to the physical symptoms that are destroying your life, you’re apparently also losing your mind.

This fear — and fear of being told it’s all in your head — runs through all the stories in BuzzFeed’s first pop-up collection on Medium, exploring an array of medical mysteries and phenomena, as well as the people who endure them. This is a reliably fascinating and popular genre of writing, further complicated, as Doree Shafrir writes in a new essay following up her experiences with night terrors, when reporting one’s own maladies. “This was me at my most vulnerable — I was writing about things that my brain and my body were doing that I had essentially no control over.”

We are excited to present her essay, and a set of stories you may have seen before on BuzzFeed, here on Medium — a gorgeous platform for words that seeks to be for features, essays, and narrative journalism what Tumblr is for memes, Twitter for political sparring, and Facebook for food videos. We are intrigued and excited to be part this project, and at the chance affords a chance to present, or re-introduce, these gripping stories. We hope you like it — and if you do, please follow BuzzFeed Collections, and check the box for Letters so you can be notified when we launch our next one.

Thanks for reading.

BuzzFeed News

Medical Mysteries: A BuzzFeed News Collection was originally published in BuzzFeed Collections on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.