by Jim Palmer
I’ve come to accept that I’m a late bloomer. For a long time I carried shame about that, as if arriving late to my own life was some kind of failure. But now I see it differently. Better late than never. For years I thought I was simply getting more emotional with age, softening in ways I couldn’t quite explain. Eventually I realized I wasn’t becoming more emotional—I was recovering my humanity.
For too long it had been buried beneath layers of a religion that taught me to distrust my own heart, to treat my inner life as something dangerous, deceitful, and fundamentally flawed. I lived frozen for years, numb to myself and to others, mistaking suppression for virtue. But thawing happens slowly, then all at once. My heart and I made peace, and once we did, we could no longer betray each other. That was the beginning of freedom. Free at last.
I’ve come to believe deeply in the goodness of our common humanity, however bruised, diminished, or buried it may appear. The long saga of our species reveals something transcendent within us—an inner wisdom that has guided us toward compassion, cooperation, courage, and care long before doctrines tried to claim ownership of those virtues. When we are true to our highest nature, we are capable of extraordinary love and generosity. Not because a system commands it, but because something in us recognizes that this is what it means to be fully human. Our moral imagination didn’t descend from the heavens; it rose from the ground of our shared experience, shaped by the simple truth that we belong to one another.
Religious reconstruction, as I understand it, is not about rebuilding belief systems or salvaging doctrines. It’s about recovering your humanity. It’s about reclaiming the capacity to show up as a whole person—with your emotions intact, your agency restored, your inner life no longer exiled. What gets reconstructed is not dogma but capacity: the capacity to feel, to empathize, to open your heart without fear, to turn toward others with presence and mutual care. It’s the slow, courageous work of thawing out the parts of yourself that were once shamed, silenced, or split off in the name of spiritual obedience.
Religion once taught me that being human was the problem—that my instincts, desires, emotions, and questions were liabilities to be managed. But the longer I live, the more clearly I see that the real problem was not being human enough. The tragedy wasn’t my humanity; it was the systems that taught me to mistrust it. Recovering my humanity has been the most spiritual work I’ve ever done. And if blooming late is the cost of reclaiming my life, I’ll take it every time.
