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My friend Sarah fainted at her own wedding.
Not from nerves or tight corsets or the overwhelming emotion of the moment. She fainted because she'd been so anxious about fitting into her dress that she'd barely eaten or drunk anything for two days. Her blood pressure dropped. Her brain didn't get enough oxygen. And down she went, right there at the altar, saved from a concussion only by her very alert maid of honor.
The paramedics gave her IV fluids. Saline solution—basically salt water. Within twenty minutes, she was fine. Color back in her cheeks. Standing on her own. Married an hour later with a funny story that'll get told at every anniversary.
What saved her wasn't complicated medicine. It was volume. Her body needed more liquid in her circulatory system, and once it had that, everything else clicked back into place.
That liquid? Most of it becomes plasma. Pale yellow, mostly water, completely unglamorous plasma.
And I've been thinking about it ever since.
The Thing We Never Notice
Plasma is the majority shareholder in your blood—55% of every drop flowing through your veins right now. But it's the silent partner. The red blood cells get all the glory, looking dramatic and oxygen-carrying. The white blood cells are the action heroes, fighting infections. Platelets are the emergency response team, clotting wounds.
And plasma? Plasma is the water they all swim in.
Except that's like saying the ocean is just the water fish swim in. Technically true. Profoundly incomplete.
Plasma is the courier service, the transit system, the infrastructure that makes everything else possible. It carries nutrients from your last meal to cells in your toes. It transports hormones—chemical messages from your thyroid, your pancreas, your ovaries or testicles—to exactly where they need to go. It hauls waste products to your kidneys and liver for disposal.
It regulates your body temperature, distributing heat when you're warm, conserving it when you're cold. It maintains the pH balance that keeps every enzymatic reaction in your body functioning correctly. It carries antibodies, proteins, clotting factors, electrolytes.
Remove plasma from blood and you don't have blood anymore. You have a handful of cells with nowhere to go and no way to communicate.
But we barely think about it. It's just... there. The background. The substrate. Easy to overlook.
Just like a lot of essential things in life.
The Body's Economy
Here's what plasma taught me about infrastructure: you don't notice it until it fails.
When Sarah's plasma volume dropped—from dehydration, from not eating—suddenly nothing worked right. Her heart raced trying to pump insufficient fluid through her vessels. Her blood pressure plummeted. Her brain started shutting down non-essential functions to conserve resources.
It wasn't dramatic. It was mechanical. The delivery system failed, so deliveries stopped arriving.
I think about cities like this now. Roads, water lines, electrical grids—invisible until they break. The people who maintain them, overlooked until they strike. The systems we depend on utterly while acknowledging barely.
Plasma is the infrastructure of your body. And just like roads and bridges, it requires maintenance. Water. Nutrition. Electrolytes. Rest.
Skip the maintenance long enough, and you'll find out exactly how much you took it for granted.
Sarah learned this in front of 150 wedding guests. Most of us learn it more privately. But we all learn it eventually.
The Generosity Written Into You
Here's the part that gets me: your body makes extra plasma. On purpose. Abundantly.
You could donate plasma right now—have a machine pull out a liter or so—and your body would replace it within 48 hours. You wouldn't even notice the difference after the first few hours. Your bone marrow would just... make more. Your liver would synthesize more proteins. Your kidneys would adjust the balance.
You are walking around with renewable life inside you.
And we've figured out how to share it. Plasma donation is elegantly simple: sit in a chair, let a machine separate your plasma from your red cells, give the plasma away, get your cells back. An hour later you're done.
That plasma becomes medicine. Immunoglobulin therapies for people with immune deficiencies. Albumin for burn victims and trauma patients. Clotting factors for hemophiliacs. Treatments for rare diseases I can't pronounce.
One donation can help three or four people. Regular donors—people who give every few weeks—create a steady stream of healing for strangers they'll never meet.
There's something quietly miraculous about that. Your body makes something so abundant that you can literally give it away, repeatedly, and never run out.
It's generosity encoded into biology.
When the River Turns Against You
But plasma isn't always benign. Sometimes it becomes the problem.
My uncle has lupus. His immune system can't distinguish friend from foe anymore, so it attacks his own tissues. The antibodies doing the attacking? They travel through his plasma. The very system that should nourish his cells instead carries weapons against them.
Treatment involves plasmapheresis—filtering his blood, removing the plasma with its confused antibodies, replacing it with donor plasma or synthetic alternatives. Essentially, changing out the liquid his cells live in.
He describes it as strange. Watching his blood leave his body, get filtered, come back. Knowing that the thing keeping him alive is also attacking him. That he needs plasma to survive but his own plasma is trying to kill him.
The vulnerability of that stops me cold. How fragile the balance is. How something as simple as liquid—water, proteins, a few dissolved substances—can be the difference between health and illness, between life and whatever comes after.
The Marketplace We Don't Talk About
Let me be honest about the uncomfortable part: plasma is bought and sold.
Unlike whole blood, which is almost entirely donated voluntarily in most countries, plasma collection is often compensated. There's an entire industry built around it. Collection centers in economically struggling areas. People lining up twice a week because the $50 or $100 helps pay rent or buy groceries.
Some people call it exploitation. The poor selling their bodies—or at least their body fluids—to survive, while pharmaceutical companies turn that plasma into medications that cost thousands of dollars per dose.
Others call it fair exchange. Your time, your mild discomfort, compensated reasonably. Your plasma genuinely saves lives. Why shouldn't you be paid?
I don't know where I land on this. Maybe both things are true. Maybe it can be altruistic and transactional, empowering and exploitative, ethical and problematic all at once.
What I do know is this: the people donating plasma in strip mall collection centers are keeping other people alive. Whether they're doing it for money or altruism or both doesn't change that fact.
The motivation doesn't diminish the gift.
What Plasma Remembers
Here's something I learned that changed how I think about my own body: your plasma has memory.
Not consciousness. Not awareness. But history.
Every illness you've fought, every vaccine you've received—the antibodies are still there, floating in your plasma. It's a liquid archive of your immune encounters. That flu you had in college. The chickenpox from childhood. The tetanus shot after you stepped on a nail. The COVID vaccine series.
Your plasma remembers all of it.
When you donate plasma, you're not giving generic fluid. You're giving your immunological autobiography. If you've recently recovered from an infection, your plasma carries antibodies that might protect someone currently fighting that same disease.
Your experience becomes their defense.
There's something profound about that. We talk about learning from others' experiences, building on the knowledge of those who came before us. But plasma donation is literal transfer of survival wisdom. Your body teaching someone else's body what you already learned.
It's inheritance on a molecular level.
The Invisibility of Maintenance
I think the biggest lesson plasma taught me is about the things we overlook.
Your body is making plasma right now. Your bone marrow is producing albumin. Your liver is synthesizing clotting factors. Your kidneys are regulating the electrolyte balance. None of this requires your conscious attention. It just happens.
You woke up this morning and plasma was already there, flowing through roughly 60,000 miles of blood vessels, doing its unglamorous work. Maintaining pH. Distributing nutrients. Transporting hormones. Standing ready to clot if you get a paper cut.
You didn't ask for this. You don't have to manage it. Your body just... does it.
Until it doesn't. Until dehydration or illness or age or injury disrupts the system. And then suddenly you notice. Suddenly it matters.
How much of life is like that? How many people maintain systems we depend on? How many processes run in the background, essential but invisible?
The janitor who cleans the office overnight. The person who maintains the water treatment plant. The parent who does the invisible labor of keeping a household functioning. The friend who always shows up but never demands attention.
All the plasma of our lives. Overlooked until absent.
The Pale Yellow Truth
I keep coming back to Sarah's wedding. How close she came to real harm from something so preventable. How simple the fix was—just fluids, just volume, just giving her body what it needed to maintain its systems.
Sometimes I think we're all a little like that. Running on empty, ignoring basic needs, pushing through until something breaks. Acting like we can function without maintenance, without rest, without the fundamental stuff that keeps our systems running.
Your body knows better. It's constantly trying to maintain balance—producing plasma, regulating temperature, fighting infections, healing wounds. Working to keep you alive even when you're not paying attention, even when you're actively making its job harder.
The least we can do is notice. Drink water. Rest occasionally. Maybe donate plasma if you can—give away some of that abundance your body makes anyway.
And maybe, just maybe, start noticing the plasma in our lives. The unglamorous, essential, background things that make everything else possible.
The infrastructure. The maintenance. The quiet, constant work of keeping systems running.
It's not dramatic. It won't make headlines. It's just pale yellow fluid flowing through your veins.
But remove it, and everything stops.
Sarah knows that now. She drinks water before big events. She eats regularly no matter how tight the dress. She learned the hard way that you can't run on empty, no matter how much you want to.
Her body taught her something simple, something profound: the invisible things matter most.
The plasma flows.
It always has.
And if we're lucky—if we pay attention, if we maintain, if we appreciate—it always will.#plasma @Plasma $XPL

There's a walrus named Wally who became famous a few years back for showing up in places walruses absolutely should not be.
He appeared on beaches in Ireland. Clambered onto a fishing boat in Wales. Hauled his 800-pound body onto a small submarine in Cornwall, nearly sinking it. He even made it to Spain—thousands of miles from Arctic waters—where he commandeered a pontoon and refused to leave, napping in the Mediterranean sun like a confused, whiskered tourist.
Biologists said he was lost. Separated from his herd, probably disoriented, definitely alone.
But here's what struck me: Wally kept seeking out boats. Docks. Anywhere humans gathered. As if he was looking for something. As if solitude wasn't natural to him, even when his own kind were nowhere to be found.
As if loneliness was worse than being lost.
The Weight of Belonging
Walruses aren't meant to be alone, and they know it.
In the wild, they haul out in groups that can number in the thousands. They pile onto each other without ceremony or personal space—flipper on belly, tusk near face, breath mingling in the cold Arctic air. The sound is extraordinary: a cacophony of grunts, belches, snores, and what can only be described as gossip.
Young calves stay tucked against their mothers, learning the social rules. Adolescent males roughhouse at the edges, testing boundaries. Elder walruses claim the center spots, having earned their position through years of simply surviving. Everyone touches someone. Always.
Scientists call this "contact comfort." Psychologists recognize it as something deeper: the fundamental need for physical presence that transcends species.
A walrus alone is a walrus in crisis, even if it's well-fed and physically healthy. Because survival, for them, has never been a solo endeavor.
The Language of Grunts
Watch a walrus colony for any length of time and you'll realize they never shut up.
They vocalize constantly. Low rumbles that vibrate through the ground. High-pitched whistles that carry across water. Bell-like sounds that scientists still don't fully understand—produced somewhere in the throat using air sacs, creating music that seems impossibly delicate coming from such massive creatures.
Males "sing" during breeding season, elaborate compositions that can last 24 hours straight. They're not just showing off. They're storytelling. Advertising. Pleading. Promising. The songs contain distinct phrases that other walruses recognize, remember, judge.
But it's the everyday communication that gets me. The way a mother walrus murmurs to her calf. The warning bark when a polar bear ventures too close. The irritated snort when someone takes your favorite sleeping spot. The content sigh when you finally get comfortable.
They're talking to each other the way we do—not always saying profound things, not making grand pronouncements, just... maintaining connection. Checking in. Saying "I'm here" and hearing "I'm here too" and finding comfort in the exchange.
It's communication not as information transfer, but as relationship maintenance.
That's pretty much what most human conversation is, too, if we're honest about it.
The Teenagers Who Test Everything
Walrus calves stay with their mothers for up to five years, which is practically an eternity in the animal kingdom.
During this time, they do exactly what human teenagers do: push boundaries, make terrible decisions, ignore good advice, wander off when they shouldn't, then come running back when things go wrong.
Young walruses will dive too deep, stay under too long, approach predators they should avoid. They'll challenge larger walruses they have no business challenging. They'll venture away from the herd, seeking independence, only to panic when they realize how big and dangerous the ocean actually is.
And their mothers? Patient beyond belief. Calling them back. Letting them test limits. Protecting them from consequences when necessary, but also allowing them to learn from minor mistakes. Somehow knowing the difference between danger that builds character and danger that destroys.
There's a video of a young walrus attempting to haul out on an ice floe, failing repeatedly, getting increasingly frustrated. The mother watches from the water. She could help. She doesn't. She waits. On the seventh try, the youngster makes it, and you can almost see the pride—both the mother's and the calf's.
That's not instinct. That's wisdom. That's understanding that struggle is sometimes the point.
Every parent who's watched their kid fail at something, heart breaking, knowing they have to let it happen—you're in good company. Walruses have been doing this for millennia.
The Male Who Just Wants to Be Held
Here's something researchers discovered that surprised them: male walruses are tender with each other.
We expect aggression. Competition. The constant jockeying for dominance that we've projected onto nature because it mirrors our own toxic patterns. And yes, males do fight. They spar with their tusks, inflict wounds, establish hierarchies.
But they also rest together. Young males especially form close bonds—"bachelor groups" that persist for years. They travel together, feed together, haul out beside each other. In the water, they've been observed playing, which serves no obvious survival purpose except joy.
And they touch. Constantly. Deliberately. Not sexually, just... affectionately. Checking in with flippers. Pressing their heavily whiskered muzzles together. Lying in contact even when there's plenty of space to spread out.
Male walruses seem to understand something we're still struggling with: that strength and tenderness aren't opposites. That needing physical closeness doesn't diminish you. That the biggest, toughest male in the group still sleeps better when someone's nearby.
There's a lesson there that we're still failing to learn.
When Home Disappears
The climate crisis isn't abstract for walruses. It's their entire world literally melting.
Sea ice used to provide perfect resting platforms. Mothers could nurse calves safely between feeding dives. Herds could spread out, rest, recover. The ice was home—not permanent, but reliable enough. Cyclical. Something their bodies remembered across generations.
Now that ice is vanishing. Some areas have lost 80% of summer sea ice in the last few decades.
So walruses crowd onto beaches in unprecedented numbers. 30,000 animals on a single strip of shore in Alaska. 100,000 in Russia. The press of bodies becomes dangerous. Stampedes happen. Calves get crushed. The noise and stress are immense.
Some walruses, disoriented and exhausted, climb cliffs. Walruses. Three-quarter-ton marine mammals. Climbing.
They're not stupid. They're desperate. When the world you evolved for no longer exists, you try impossible things because impossible feels like the only option left.
I think about this a lot. How we're living through our own version—systems breaking down, certainties dissolving, having to adapt to changes happening faster than our generational wisdom can process. Making choices that might look absurd to outsiders but feel necessary when you're just trying to survive another day.
The walruses climbing cliffs aren't a metaphor. But they might as well be.
The Gift They Give
Despite everything, walruses still donate.
Not intentionally, of course. But their presence feeds ecosystems. When they forage along the seafloor, their massive disturbance creates clouds of nutrients that feed fish populations. When they haul out, their waste fertilizes coastal vegetation. When they die, their bodies sustain scavengers through brutal winters.
They take what they need—clams, mostly, thousands per day—but they give back in ways both measurable and mysterious. The ocean is richer for their presence. The Arctic ecosystem relies on them in ways scientists are still discovering.
There's no moral calculation in this. Walruses aren't trying to give back. They're just living, and their living creates abundance for others.
Maybe that's the point. Maybe the most meaningful contributions aren't the calculated ones. Maybe just living fully, authentically, taking up space without apology—maybe that's the gift.
What Wally Understood
Back to Wally, that wandering walrus who ended up in all the wrong places.
Wildlife experts eventually encouraged him to move along from harbors where he'd become a nuisance. They worried about his health, his safety, the danger he posed to small boats. There was talk of relocating him to a sanctuary.
But here's what I think Wally understood: connection matters more than correctness.
He was in the wrong waters, thousands of miles from proper walrus habitat. But he wasn't alone. There were boats, people, activity, presence. It wasn't his species, but it was company. And for a creature whose entire evolutionary history says "never be alone," strange company was better than no company.
Eventually, Wally did move on. Maybe he found his way back north. Maybe he found other walruses. Maybe he's still out there, that strange wanderer, looking for places to rest.
I hope he found his herd. But part of me admires his willingness to make do, to seek connection in unexpected places, to choose presence over perfection.
The Walrus in the Mirror
So what can a walrus teach us?
That we're not meant to do this alone. That asking for closeness isn't weakness. That the grunt and rumble of everyday communication—the "how are you" and "I'm here" and "I see you"—that's not small talk. That's survival.
That parenting is eternal patience mixed with the wisdom to let go. That being male doesn't mean being isolated. That when your world changes beyond recognition, trying impossible things isn't foolish—it's proof you're still fighting.
That your presence matters, even when you're not trying to matter. That taking up space is okay. That rest is communal, connection is physical, and tenderness is strength.
The walrus doesn't overthink any of this. It just lives—awkward and enormous and tender and persistent.
And every day, through sheer, stubborn existence, it proves that life is better when you're touching someone you trust, better when you're surrounded by the grunt and snore of your people, better when you know that if you fall, you'll fall into the warmth of bodies that will catch you.
Maybe we're not so different.
Maybe we're all just walruses, in our way—looking for safe places to rest, for people who'll let us be close, for the simple comfort of not being alone.
Maybe that's enough.
Maybe that's everything.#walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL

Przez twoje żyły płynie wszechświat, a ty prawdopodobnie nigdy nie pomyślałeś o tym dwa razy.
Nazywa się osocze i łatwo je przeoczyć. Kiedy myślimy o krwi, wyobrażamy sobie czerwoną substancję - dramatyczną, filmową czerwień, która oznacza życie i śmierć. Romantyzujemy serce, ten niezłomny pompujący organ. Zachwycamy się mózgiem, tym elektrycznym cudem. Ale osocze? Bladożółte, głównie woda, zdecydowanie nieefektowne osocze?
Zapominamy, że istnieje.
I myślę, że to największa tragedia osocza. Ponieważ osocze jest niesławnym bohaterem twojego ciała, sceną, na której staje każdy inny wykonawca, cichym prądem, który sprawia, że wszystko inne jest możliwe.

Nigdy nie zapomnę, kiedy po raz pierwszy naprawdę zobaczyłem morsa—nie w zoo, nie w dokumencie, ale naprawdę zobaczyłem go takim, jakim był.
Zaciągał się na skalisty występ gdzieś w Morzu Beringa, widoczny przez lornetkę z statku badawczego, na którym miałem szczęście być. Stworzenie poruszało się z tym, co mogę opisać tylko jako zdeterminowane wyczerpanie, jak ktoś dźwigający zakupy na cztery piętra po dwunastogodzinnej zmianie. Płetwy uderzały, ciało podrywało się, kły zgrzytały o kamień. A kiedy w końcu dotarło na szczyt, nie zaprezentowało się majestatycznie ani nie rozglądało po swoim królestwie.

Jest coś głęboko ludzkiego w morsie, nawet jeśli na pierwszy rzut oka tego nie widzimy.
Wyobraź sobie to: stworzenie o wadze 3,000 funtów, które wciąga się na górę lodową z całą gracją kogoś, kto wychodzi z basenu po męczącym dniu. Mors opada w kupę, tłusty i wspaniały, otoczony przez dziesiątki swoich towarzyszy. Przepychają się o miejsce, burczą na siebie i w końcu osiadają w ogromnej, chrapiącej kupie zadowolenia.
Jeśli to nie brzmi znajomo, to nie wiem co brzmi.

Większość ludzi myśli, że zna morsy. Ogromne. Z kłami. Z wąsami. Ten dziwny dźwięk szczekania, który wydają, gdy są zirytowane. Ale dopóki nie spędzisz naprawdę czasu, myśląc o tym, jak to jest być morskiem, tracisz jedno z najbardziej uroczych stworzeń natury.
Poznaj Wally'ego. To 12-letni samiec morsa atlantyckiego, ważący przyzwoite 1,800 funtów, z kłami, które sprawiłyby, że każdy dentysta zapłakałby z zawodowego podziwu. Ale Wally to nie tylko kolejna tłusta twarz w tłumie. Ma osobowość, problemy i zaskakująco relatywną codzienną rutynę.

Słuchaj, muszę ci opowiedzieć o osoczu i potrzebuję, żebyś mnie wysłuchał, bo to może brzmieć szalenie.
Masz około 1,5 galona złotej cieczy krążącej w twoich żyłach, która jednocześnie jest najbardziej nudną i najbardziej cudowną substancją, jaką twoje ciało produkuje. Nie ma chwały komórek krwi. Nie ma mistycyzmu płynu mózgowo-rdzeniowego. Nikt nie pisze wierszy o osoczu.
A to jest głęboka niesprawiedliwość.
Ponieważ osocze—ta bladożółta ciecz, która stanowi 55% twojej krwi—robi tutaj absolutnie najwięcej, a nie dostaje żadnego uznania. To najlepszy aktor drugoplanowy. Przyjaciel, który pomaga ci w przeprowadzce. Członek grupowego projektu, który wykonuje całą pracę, podczas gdy wszyscy inni biorą zasługi.