Most people probably think that by 65, a man should know exactly who he is.
I thought I did.
I knew who I was as a husband. A father. A grandfather. A coach. A business owner. A man who had survived addiction, seven back surgeries, a knee replacement and more restarts than I can count.
I knew how to be strong for other people.
I knew how to help men and women transform their bodies, improve their health and regain their confidence. I’ve spent the last 17 years doing that work.
But somewhere along the way, I started asking myself a question I could no longer avoid:
Who is Colin F. Watson when he is not being who everyone else needs him to be?
That question is where this journal begins.
At 65, I find myself standing at the intersection of everything I have been and everything I may still become.
My body is recovering.
My marriage of 26 years is changing.
My relationships are changing.
My business is changing.
The way I think about money, masculinity, intimacy, faith and love is changing.
And perhaps most importantly, the relationship I have with myself is changing.
For much of my life, I believed strength meant knowing what to do next.
Keep moving.
Keep producing.
Keep providing.
Keep fixing.
Keep becoming more successful, more disciplined, more certain and more useful to the people around me.
But life has a way of bringing a man to places where none of those things can save him.
There are moments when the body stops cooperating.
When the relationship you thought would last forever begins asking questions neither person can ignore.
When money creates fear instead of freedom.
When the future you spent years building suddenly looks different from the one you imagined.
When you look into the mirror and recognize the face—but realize you are no longer completely certain you recognize the man.
That is where I am.
This is not a story being written from the other side of the mountain.
I am not writing after everything has been resolved, wrapped in a lesson and tied with a perfect bow.
I am writing from inside it.
Inside the uncertainty.
Inside the recovery.
Inside the grief.
Inside the possibility.
Inside the uncomfortable space between the man I have been and the man I am becoming.
For nearly eight years, I have written letters to God.
I sit down with my journal and write what is true—sometimes before I fully understand what that truth means.
I write about fear.
I write about money.
I write about my marriage.
I write about my body.
I write about desire, shame, faith, anger, love and the things men are often taught to carry silently.
Those pages have held parts of me that very few people have ever seen.
They have also shown me something:
A man can spend his entire life building an identity and still reach a point where he has to ask whether that identity is truly his.
How much of who I became came from my soul?
How much came from survival?
How much came from wanting approval?
How much came from fear of rejection, failure, abandonment or being misunderstood?
And who might I become if I stopped asking permission to be fully me?
That is what Becoming Colin is about.
It is not a self-help column.
It is not a marketing funnel.
It is not a place where I pretend to have mastered every lesson before I share it.
It is a living journal about what happens when a man becomes willing to tell himself the truth.
Some entries will be about health and recovery.
Some will be about separation after a long marriage and the strange experience of trying to find yourself again when your life has been intertwined with someone else’s for more than two decades.
Some will be about business and money.
Some will be about friendship, family, sexuality, masculinity and faith.
Some may be uncomfortable.
Some may contradict what I believed six months earlier.
Some may reveal mistakes I wish I had not made.
That is part of becoming.
I am no longer interested in presenting a version of myself that has everything figured out.
I am interested in discovering what is real.
There is a difference.
For most of my life, becoming meant adding something:
More knowledge.
More muscle.
More money.
More recognition.
More discipline.
More accomplishments.
Now I wonder if becoming is also about removing things.
The masks.
The roles.
The fear.
The need to control how other people see me.
The belief that I must earn love by being useful.
The habit of shrinking, performing or explaining myself so that someone else can remain comfortable.
Maybe becoming is not about creating a new man.
Maybe it is about finally meeting the man who has been underneath all of it.
I don’t know exactly where this journey will lead.
That is the honest answer.
But I know I want to document it while it is happening—not years from now, when memory has softened the edges and turned uncertainty into a clean story.
I want to tell the truth while my hands are still shaking.
While the questions are still alive.
While the lessons are still becoming lessons.
While I am still becoming Colin.
If you are reading this while your own life is changing—if you are questioning who you have been, what you truly want or how much of yourself you have abandoned to become acceptable to other people—perhaps you will find something of yourself here too.
I am not inviting you to follow me because I know the way.
I am inviting you because I am finally willing to walk it honestly.
I’m Colin F. Watson.
I’m 65.
I’m still healing.
I’m still building.
I’m still becoming.
And for the first time in a long time, I am giving myself permission to find out who I really am.