Some People Call Me Jess
When I was little, I decided that if I ever got to choose my own name, it would be Lacy. I had a pair of white Keds with lace flowers on the sides, and I loved those shoes so freakin’ much. So Lacy seemed like the obvious choice.
Nobody asked me, which was probably for the best.
I've been thinking about this because I just finished listening to The Names by Florence Knapp. It's about a mother who hesitates over giving her baby the same name as his father, and the book runs three versions of the boy's name, alternating between the accounts. I spent most of it wondering how much of a person arrives with the name and how much gets built after. (If you pick it up, know going in that it's largely a book about domestic abuse, and some of it is hard.)
Who actually decides what you get called?
Mostly not you. In my case, a fifth-grade teacher.
My given name is Jessica. Somewhere in elementary school I moved on from Lacy and started doodling variations of my own name instead, the way you do, in the margins and on the covers of notebooks. Possibly paired with the last name of a certain member of the 90210 cast. Possibly not. I'm not going to confirm anything.
Then I switched schools in fifth grade, and there was already a Jessica in the class. My teacher asked if I'd be willing to go by Jessi. I said yes, and here's where all that doodling finally paid off, because I also got to choose how to spell it.
That's it. That's the whole origin of the name I've used for most of my life and put on the cover of a book. Two Jessicas in one classroom, and I was the new one.
Jessi is what almost everyone calls me now, and it's what I prefer.
When does a nickname become something a person has to earn?
The minute it stops being about convenience and starts being about closeness.
Family often gives you a nickname whether you like it or not. Mine became Jess. Also Messer-Jesser, which I have my Aunt Patti to thank for, and which I am apparently never going to outgrow.
Then my closest friends started using Jess too. I noticed how carefully they did it the first time, almost like they were trying it on to see how I'd react. They were. That's what people do when they're testing whether they've been let in.
I got married and my name changed again, the last part of it anyway. I was so excited to take Chad's last name. Not because there was anything wrong with the one I had, but because he was my new family and I wanted the name that said so. Then he started calling me Jess. Our friend group grew, and now many of them do as well.
So Jess belongs to the family I was born into and the family I built. That's the rule, and I didn't write it down anywhere, and I didn't know I had it until somebody broke it.
Because when someone outside those circles calls me Jess, I have a physical reaction to it. Not anger exactly. More like a flinch. My body knows before my manners catch up. I've corrected people. Out loud. To their face.
It took me a while to work out what the flinch actually is, because it isn't really about the name. It's about trust. Jess belongs to people who were in the room for the hard parts, or who stayed long enough to be trusted with them. When somebody skips all of that and helps themselves to the name anyway, they're claiming a closeness we haven't built. The name is just where I happen to notice it.
People do the same thing with questions. Someone you've met twice asks about the worst thing that ever happened to you in the same tone they'd use to ask about your weekend, and the flinch is identical. Not because the question is wrong, but because they haven't earned the answer yet.
The formal versions are easier, honestly. At the doctor's office and in anything legal, I'm Jessica or Mrs. Bixler, and that's fine, because those rooms aren't pretending to know me. It's the false closeness that gets me, not the distance.
Would a different name have made me a different person?
No, and I've tested the idea.
After I lost my job, in that strange gap before I started my company, I thought seriously about going back to Jessica. A real reinvention, a clean version of myself, a name with some posture to it. I even considered putting Jessica on the cover of the book. It felt like the kind of thing a serious author would do.
I didn't. The name on the front is the one people who know me use, and the book has my family's voices in it alongside my own, so it seemed right that the cover should say what they'd say if they walked in the room.
I don't need a name to reinvent me. I've done that work the regular way, slowly and without a rebrand.
But I'm going to keep protecting the ones I have. So if we've just met, it's Jessi. Give it a few years.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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