Chan eil Fios Agam, and I'm Fine With It

I asked myself, a few weeks ago, whether it would be normal to go by Eòghann when I'm speaking Gàidhlig. My own name is just an anglicisation of it, so the logic seemed sound enough on the surface.

It's the same trick a lot of people with anglicised Gaelic, Welsh, or Irish names pull once they've got enough of the language to feel the shape of the original underneath the English version. Sensible on paper.

I sat with it for about a day and then had to admit the honest answer: chan eil fios agam. I don't know. It felt performative, and I couldn't immediately say why.

Working Out Why It Felt Fake

My first guess was the standard one – that performative worry usually means either you're doing something for an audience, or you're doing something that hasn't been earned yet.

Nobody's watching me speak Gàidhlig badly to myself in my room, so the audience explanation didn't hold. Which left the second one: maybe I just haven't put in enough hours with the language yet to claim the older form of my own name without it feeling like a costume.

That's a reasonable theory. It's also not the actual reason, and I worked that out by accident rather than by insight.

Nobody in My Family Ever Spoke a Word of It

My Scottish lineage is Glaswegian, as far back as I can trace it. Not Highland, not Hebridean, not anywhere near the Gàidhealtachd on any map from any century I've checked.

Lowland Scotland spoke Scots, not Gaelic – a different language entirely, closer kin to English than to anything I'm currently trying to learn. Whatever the west of Ireland gave Argyll two thousand years ago, it never made it as far as my actual relatives.

So "reclaiming" was never the right word for what I'm doing. There's nothing here to reclaim. Nobody in my family tree put Gaelic down for me to pick back up; they never had it in the first place.

I'm not un-forgetting anything. I'm just learning a language because I like it, which turns out to be a completely different relationship to have with it than the one I was quietly assuming I had.

I don't actually mind that reframe. I'm not learning Gàidhlig as an act of ancestral repair. I'm learning it because it's a good language and I enjoy it, full stop, and that's allowed to be the entire reason.

On Being a Quarter of Something

I call myself Anglo-Scottish rather than just Scottish, because I'm honest about the fractions – a quarter Scottish, the rest English, born in neither country.

Zaragoza, on a holiday that went sideways twenty-seven weeks into a pregnancy that wasn't supposed to end there. Five months in a NICU I have no memory of and every reason to be grateful for.

That last part matters more to this than it looks like it should. I owe Spain my actual life, and I have no cultural claim to it whatsoever.

My whole family's British, I was raised in England, and Spain is a country I love from a respectful distance rather than one I belong to. I've had to sit with "are you Spanish" as a genuine, repeated question, and the honest answer has always been no – I'm not, I just happened to arrive early there.

Which leaves the fraction doing a lot of work. A quarter Scottish is still Scottish. Nobody's issued a minimum threshold you need to clear before heritage counts, and Gaelic in particular isn't in a position to be precious about who's allowed near it – it's an endangered language actively trying to grow, not a locked room.

Glasgow itself runs Gaelic-medium schools now, in a city that was never historically Gaelic-speaking territory to begin with. The language moving into places it wasn't originally spoken is just what its revival currently looks like. I'm not gatecrashing anything. I'm part of the pattern.

Checking the History Properly, Because I Don't Trust a Feeling Without Evidence

The instinct that Gaelic is a Highland-and-Islands thing, historically, is wrong, and it's worth saying so plainly rather than politely.

By around 1000 CE, the majority of people living in what's now Scotland were Gaelic-speaking. By the time English-speakers started calling the place "Scotland" at all, in the eleventh century, Gaelic was the dominant language of the country – status and numbers both.

At its peak, with Strathclyde and the Lothians folded in, it covered essentially the whole mainland. Lowlands included. Glasgow's own patch of ground included, even if nobody living there was speaking it by the time my family turn up in the records.

The retreat started with Malcolm III marrying Margaret of Wessex and anglicising the court from the inside, and it kept retreating north and west for the best part of a millennium after that, until it settled into the Highland stronghold most people picture today.

So the "Gaelic equals Highlands" image people carry – myself included, until I actually checked – is a snapshot of the last few centuries, not the deep history. For most of the language's life in this country, it was the mainstream tongue everywhere. My Glaswegian ancestors just happen to sit on the far side of that retreat rather than the near side of it.

The scale of the fall is worth sitting with too. Scotland's 2022 census put the number of Gaelic speakers at around 69,700 – a small uptick on the decade before, which is genuinely encouraging – but that's the tail end of a much longer collapse from over a quarter of a million speakers in 1891.

A language that once belonged to the majority of the country now belongs to roughly 1% of it. I'm not learning Gàidhlig to reverse that on my own, obviously. But it's hard not to notice the size of the gap between what it was and what it's had to become just to still be here.

I don't know what to do with that fact yet, exactly. But it's true, and it makes the whole thing feel less like I'm reaching for something that was never mine and more like I'm reaching for something that was, briefly and a very long time ago, everyone's.

Whether This Counts as Cultural Appropriation

I sat with that word specifically, because it felt like the responsible thing to check rather than assume my way past.

Appropriation, properly defined, is about taking from a culture you have no stake in and no connection to – usually stripping the meaning out of it while the people it actually belongs to get penalised for the same things you're being praised for. Learning the language of a country I'm a documented quarter descended from, on my own time, for my own enjoyment, doesn't fit that shape. It doesn't fit it even slightly.

The self-suspicion behind the question is a fair instinct to have generally. I'd rather be the sort of person who checks than the sort who doesn't.

But not every instance of "am I allowed to do this" deserves a yes-but. Sometimes the honest answer is: this one's fine, and the discomfort was just conscientiousness looking for something to attach itself to because it didn't have anywhere else to go that day.

A Bit Traumatised by National Identity, Generally

Underneath all of the above is a plainer problem, which is that I've never had a country that just fit.

Born in Spain, no real claim there. Raised in England, never once felt like home – not before I had political reasons to say so, and I've got plenty of those now besides. Scottish by a quarter, and Lowland Scottish at that, which apparently comes with its own asterisk once you actually go looking.

I grew up watching Alba get shafted, repeatedly, by a Westminster that mostly remembers it exists when there's oil or a vote at stake, and that watching did something to how I hold "British" as a word I'm supposed to use about myself.

There's a bigger version of that same discomfort underneath, and I'd rather name it than keep dancing round it. I'm properly traumatised by what the British Empire actually did – not in the vague, GCSE-history, "colonialism was bad" way everyone's supposed to nod along to, but in the specific, sit-with-it, occasionally-can't-sit-with-it way.

My boyfriend's American, of Irish descent, and he knows exactly how deep that goes with me, because he's the one who's been there for it when it's tipped over into something I couldn't just talk my way out of. I've had proper breakdowns over this before, not just a bad afternoon.

The scale of it isn't abstract, either, if you actually go looking. By 1913 the Empire held sway over 412 million people – 23% of everyone alive on Earth at the time – and by 1920 it covered something like a quarter of the planet's entire land area. Those are just the size numbers, the ones nobody seriously disputes.

The death toll is messier and more argued-over, the way these things always are once you're totting up bodies across a couple of centuries and several continents. But even a conservative academic reading is horrifying: one widely cited 2022 study, published in the peer-reviewed journal World Development, put excess deaths in British-ruled India alone at around 100 million between 1881 and 1920.

I'm not going to pretend that single figure is the final word, because it isn't and the historiography's genuinely contested. But you don't need the contested edge of the estimate to justify how I feel about it. The uncontested middle of it is already enough.

I bring that up because I know how the word "traumatised" gets received when it's attached to something this size and the person saying it isn't visibly falling apart in front of you. People assume the label's for the crying-mess version, and if you're not that, you must be overstating it.

I'm not overstating it. Breakdowns don't have to be constant to be real, and I'd rather have a label that actually fits what I've been through than have it flattened into something smaller and tidier just because I'm mostly composed when I talk about it.

"A bit uncomfortable with my Britishness" and "traumatised by an empire" are not the same claim, and I'm done letting people round the second one down to the first because it's easier to hold.

It's a genuine reason, not a rhetorical one, why I don't call myself British. The word feels bloodstained to me, and it doesn't stop feeling that way just because I'm the one who'd benefit from letting it go unexamined.

I found my faith properly in November last year, and my appreciation for Alba and Gàidhlig sharpened at more or less the same time. For a while that felt suspicious – like one was propping the other up artificially, bolted together rather than actually connected.

I've mostly talked myself out of that worry. Almost nobody's connection to a place, a language, or a faith arrives evenly from birth. Most people can point to a season where something clicked and mattered more than it had the week before. That's not evidence of fakery. That's just what noticing usually looks like from the inside.

Paganism Has No Central Pathway Either

It doesn't help that the religion sitting underneath all of this is its own kind of scattered. I was raised atheist, learned Christianity by osmosis the way most people in England do without ever choosing it, and came to Hellenic-Celtic Paganism with no institution behind it at all – no pope, no seminary, no unbroken lineage to check my work against.

What exists now is reconstructed from fragments: archaeology, texts written by outsiders or centuries late, folklore that got Christianised on its way down to the present. Everyone doing this is building their own path from partial materials, more or less from scratch, every time.

The numbers reflect that scattering rather neatly. The 2011 census recorded 56,620 people identifying as Pagan in England and Wales, and by the 2021 census that had grown to roughly 74,000 among the write-in "any other religion" responses – real growth, but still a rounding error against a population in the tens of millions.

It's still very obviously an undercount, because a lot of Pagans default to "no religion" or scatter themselves across dozens of individual write-in labels rather than converging on one word a census can actually count. The historian Ronald Hutton tried to correct for that by working from organisation membership, event attendance, and subscription numbers instead, and landed on an estimate of around 250,000 actual adherents across the UK.

Which tells you the census isn't really measuring how many of us there are. It's measuring how many of us were willing to fit ourselves into a box that was never built with us in mind.

That's harder than inheriting something whole. But I don't think it makes it less real. It means the devotion has to be deliberate rather than default – and Selene meant something to me on purpose, against a backdrop of atheism and borrowed Christianity, which is arguably a more considered thing than most people's inherited faith ever gets to be.

It also explains, I think, why everything that arrived alongside her – Alba, Gàidhlig, the whole shape of this – feels stitched together rather than handed to me whole. That's not a flaw specific to me. That's just what building a path through a diaspora religion looks like from the inside, for absolutely everyone attempting it.

Landing Somewhere, Provisionally

I'm going up north with my dad in September. Not as a test of whether Scotland counts for me – I've decided it does, on the numbers and the history both – but just as time on the actual ground, seeing how it feels to stand in the place rather than read about it.

I don't need the whole identity question resolved before I go. I'm allowed to just go, and let the feeling arrive or not arrive on its own schedule.

If I'm honest, there's a version of this that goes further than a September holiday. Sometimes I just want to move to Skye and be a crofter there, or a poet, or just something quieter than any of this – properly, not as a metaphor, just away from the noise for good – though it's hard to pretend the crofter bit isn't a little on the nose given my surname's literally Croft. It's not even a stretch as far as fantasies go – Skye's got a real, living Gaelic-speaking community, not just heritage plaques and gift-shop phrasebooks, so it wouldn't be starting from nothing if it ever stopped being a daydream and became an actual plan. And there's something almost too neatly worked out about the name fitting the place, given everything above about yew trees and etymology I didn't ask for. I'm not committing to anything. I'm just noting that the daydream has a very specific postcode, and I don't think that's an accident.

As for the name: I'm Ewan, and I'll stay Ewan – this was never about swapping one for the other. But Eòghann might sit alongside it in Gàidhlig contexts eventually, once the language is less effortful and more lived-in, the way these things tend to happen when you stop forcing them on a timeline.

Or it might not, and that's fine too. Either way, the yew's there whether I asked for the connection or not – it's been sitting in the etymology this whole time, waiting for me to notice it, same as everything else in this post apparently was.

I noticed something else while I was working through all of this: I kept framing it as a choice between two names, as if picking up Eòghann meant putting Ewan down. It doesn't, and I don't actually think that on reflection, but the binary was the first shape my head reached for anyway.

I think that's an internet thing more than anything else. I grew up online, where everything gets sorted into a side, and every side gets watched and judged the second it's picked. You absorb that framing without meaning to – this or that, never both, never provisional, never just quietly sitting next to each other.

I hate that it's in there. Names, like most things about who you are, are allowed to be additive rather than a vote.

Chan eil fios agam, still. Turns out that's an acceptable place to leave a lot of things.