Johanna lives in Frankfurt. She was diagnosed with MS at the age of 22.
I visited her in her home to witness what is usually invisible.
About MS
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease of the central nervous system. It disrupts the flow of information between brain and body. Symptoms are often invisible like fatigue, numbness, tingling, blurred vision, difficulties in movement or concentration. They come and go, change over time, and affect each person differently.
What cannot be seen is often the hardest to carry.
Sitting quietly with a book, her world fractures into pieces.
The kaleidoscope of light mirrors the invisible fatigue of MS: thoughts scattered, focus slipping, energy dissolving. What looks serene on the outside is often fragmented within.
The skin. Battlefield of invisible sensations.
She drops the needle on the record with gloved hands.
The simplest details slip away….textures, edges, the weight of small things.
Numbness turns the familiar into distance, leaving her cut off from the everyday world where fingers are meant to feel.
Numbness hides the details of life.
She lies still, while ants crawl across her legs.
The swarm mirrors the restless tingling of MS, the vibrations under the skin, impossible to ignore.
It overwhelms, distracts, and floods the senses like an invasion that never ends.
Johanna is strong and active. She lifts weights, she trains, she moves her body with determination. Yet there are days when the same body keeps her in bed, demanding rest for fourteen hours straight. Strength and exhaustion live side by side.
Double vision turns the familiar into the strange. The colors shift, edges blur.
It feels like living on another planet, a world visited but not truly home. The hope remains: one day you wake up and it is gone.
Have you ever felt constricted, as if a rubber band were cutting into your arms, legs, or chest?
There is nothing to see, and yet the body insists: a band tightens, movement narrows.
You can’t see anything, but what’s invisible can still be painfully real.
Sometimes it is completely gone, then I am just me. Only me.
It belongs to me. It is not an illness, because I am not always sick. I am healthy, here and there. Then everything is fine.
And yet it is my life: the uncertainty, the fear, the possibilities. It makes me who I am, the contradictions that live inside me.
Sometimes I am simply exhausted. Everything in my head feels like cotton wool, soft and wonderfully gentle. My thoughts sink into it; I cannot grasp them.
Holding on to freedom.
I am not only the illness.
I am not only the symptoms.
I am the sum of contradictions: strength and exhaustion, laughter and fear, clarity and confusion.
I carry uncertainty, but also resilience.
I live with limits, and yet I search for freedom.
All of this belongs to me.
And still, above everything else, I am Johanna.
Concept, Texts, Photos: Yvonne Fischer 2025