When my folks first had me, they put some thought into what they'd name me. My folks decided they liked J names for some reason. If I were born a girl they would have named me Joanne, which makes me shudder.

Instead they named me Jacob, and have given a couple different reasons. The first and foremost is they wanted to give me an old name, one that resonated across time and comes from a far away origin. The second is that Jacob in the Bible is the one from the mountains, and my parents were living deep in the mountains of Santa Cruz at the time and the romanticism appealed to them. The third is that my Dad was already more in favor of me than his first son, and named me based on the usurping nature of Jacob in the Bible.

Yeah he had some issues.

Admittedly, I didn't like my name by the 1st grade. It wasn't a terribly common name at the time, I met all of two or three other Jacobs up until I moved to Ohio. I wasn't allowed to go by any nicknames, either. My folks jumped all over me for daring to try and go by Jake.

Regardless, I started doing so in high school. All my high school friends called me Jake. One of the reasons my friend Jeff nicknamed me Stake is that it rhymed with Jake. My folks would've probably freaked if they ever knew about that one.

My Dad had his reasons for restricting nicknames. He had gone by Skip in his family while growing up, and when he went out into the world and started being called Chuck, it messed him up a bit. He tried to explain the psychology of it to me but it went over the head of a six year old, but I tried to get it.

The only exception to anyone calling me Jake was my girlfriend, Stephanie, who I usually called Steph, incidentally.

Soon after high school I started going by Jacob again. I moved back to Santa Cruz briefly and the wargames store I hung out at was run by a guy named Jake, so I went by my longer name to reduce confusion. I'd known that guy since I was a kid, so I didn't mind giving it up. For whatever reason, I kept it going when I moved to Arizona.

I think in hindsight the reduction of my social life down to just my parents made me much more susceptible to their rules.

Sometime during my time in Arizona, my Dad told me that he imagined my full name on an office door someday and thought it looked good, having some kind of visual cadence he really liked. I had come to like my name by this point, but still found his justification a little shallow.

Sometime around the mid-2010s, while I was at Ohio State, I met a person who would become one of my best friends, and I really enjoyed verbally antagonizing her. Her name is basically unique, named after a small town in northern Australia that her parents spent some time in. One night, I messaged her butchering her name down to an extremely shortened version and she replied by saying "ok cob" which took me off guard.

I'd never ever once entertained the idea of shortening my name that way. My parents certainly would never approve. They thought Jake sounded too working class, but I'm sure they would have found it extremely tasteful in comparison.

For a while, Cob was just the name my friend used to antagonize me in our bantering, and it was more like a pet name. After a couple years, I started using it in videogames like Pokémon to name my player character, but it still didn't quite feel like my name.

I eventually came into a pretty solid friendgroup, and most of its members generally call me Jacob, which is fine. However, my life had a fairly major set of upsets around 2020, and I started trying to expand my social life around the end of 2021.

As I found myself in the goth scene at the behest of my therapist, I introduced myself as Cob. At first, it didn't feel natural, admittedly. I wasn't even completely sure why I was going by it.

I was pretty deep into the alcoholism by then. So going by Cob helped me depersonalize myself from it all a bit. I was terrified of new people, having redeveloped my case of social anxiety that I'd spent most of my life fighting off, and going by Cob helped make it feel more fake and thus less scary.

This persisted for a couple years, being Cob and mingling in limited fashion while keeping myself careful not to invest too much in strangers. I didn't tell a lot of stories, and struggled to find common ground among everyone I met, focusing on how detached I was from them all.

After I quit drinking in 2024, after the worst of the withdrawals passed and I was able to start rebuilding myself, I started introducing myself again as Jacob, with the addendum that I go by Cob.

I started to feel like a person again, and Cob felt like a name that meant me, rather than just a construct to hide behind.

That said, I became okay with some new people calling me Jacob if they knew me pretty well. Obviously it's not a hard and fast rule, my dear friend still calls me Cob in a warm fashion and I don't feel I put her at a distance. My close friends call me Cob when they think it'll be funny and that's a sort of familiarity that I welcome.

Recently, a couple people have asked me to clarify what name I should be called by. Cob is the name I used to put some distance between me and new people, but I would like it if people who considered themselves more than a casual friend to me to call me Jacob.

I've got a lot of names for myself internally; Names that nobody needs to know. I feel a bit these days like Cob is less a mask and just an alternate face I can use.

I'm not exactly sure when I found the walls lowered. They're not gone, not by a long shot, and I don't think they should be. The walls are there to protect me, after all, I just don't want to entomb myself like I did for so long.

The social anxiety has faded to its bedrock, and I've even managed to chip at a little of that recently. Traversing the maze of my inner world is often a tricky endeavor, but at the very least, the face I show to the outer world is a more familiar one to me in the mirror again.

It's a face I actually like looking at for once.