At the end of my third consecutive night shift, the hospital was beginning to brighten while I was becoming progressively less human. Day staff arrived with the polished faces of people who had slept at socially acceptable hours, while I was operating somewhere between caffeine, muscle memory and whatever reserve tank the body opens when it has run out of reasonable options. Any sensible person would have gone home, shut the curtains and disappeared beneath a duvet. I, however, had a train to catch because Kai Montinola was going to Glasgow, these were the only free days my rota had surrendered to me, and Norway was waiting almost immediately after. My body wanted sleep. The fangirl had already packed.

There is a particular kind of recklessness that only makes sense when enthusiasm is involved. I had finished three nights in a row, I had not slept, and yet one sentence inside my exhausted brain remained perfectly clear: Kai is in Glasgow. Apparently, this information outranked physiology. I would like to say I made a measured decision after considering fatigue, travel time and recovery. I did not. I saw the small gap in my rota and treated it like a rare astronomical event.

Ninin and I travelled a day before the event because same-day travel felt too risky, especially when we had gifts to prepare. As one of the fanclub admins, I also had to make sure what we brought would be practical for Kai’s team because she still had a long journey back to the Philippines. That meant informing her PA in advance so they could prepare, which is how fangirling occasionally becomes a strange combination of affection, coordination and baggage management.

This is the side people do not usually see. A bouquet looks simple in a photograph, but somewhere behind it is a conversation about travel, storage and whether admiration has accidentally exceeded the luggage allowance. There are gifts to organise, messages to relay, timing to consider and several little decisions that make the whole thing feel less like ordinary fangirling and more like a tiny international operation with no salary and very enthusiastic staff.

By the time Ninin and I arrived at the hotel, exhaustion had become less a feeling and more a landscape. My limbs felt delayed, my eyes had that gritty heaviness that comes after being awake far longer than the body has politely requested, and sitting down felt suspiciously close to becoming permanent. Bed was clearly the medically appropriate intervention.

Naturally, we went out for Chinese food.

This is what happens when tired people are allowed to make independent decisions.

We sat in a Chinese restaurant with hot food in front of us, trying to convince our nervous systems that we were still functioning normally. My body clock had resigned hours earlier, so the meal could technically have been breakfast, dinner or emergency maintenance. None of that mattered. The food was warm, Ninin was beside me, Glasgow was finally real, and somewhere not too far away was the person we had travelled all this way to see.

By the time we returned to the hotel, the bed looked almost sacred. I barely remember the transition from upright to horizontal, but I do remember thinking that if anyone needed me urgently, they would have to negotiate directly with gravity. For once, even fangirling had to wait until morning.

The next day felt different from the moment I opened my eyes. There is a particular kind of electricity in the air when you wake up knowing the day contains something you have imagined many times but never actually experienced. The hotel room was ordinary, yet everything inside it seemed more significant. Clothes mattered. Hair mattered. Phones were charged with the seriousness of life-support equipment. Gifts were checked repeatedly despite having remained exactly where we had left them.

Outside, Glasgow was simply having another day. Inside the hotel, the fangirl department had opened early. Until then, Kai had mostly existed through a screen for me. There were livestreams, interviews, performances, photographs, edits, updates, fan projects and the endless conversations that form around someone you support. Over time, that support had also grown into admin work, where admiration somehow develops departments. Somebody checks schedules, somebody handles information, somebody prepares graphics, somebody coordinates posts, and eventually everybody behaves as though a small communications agency has appeared by accident. The salaries remained imaginary. The responsibility did not.

As one of the fanclub admins, meeting Kai felt different from simply attending an event as a casual supporter. I was excited, of course, but I was also carrying something larger than my own excitement. There were gifts prepared with care, messages from people who could not be there, and a sense that I was representing a little part of the community that had been supporting her from a distance.

Then we were given the opportunity to meet her before the event.

That sentence looks very calm on the page.

I was not.

My brain did not handle this transition with elegance.

There is an enormous difference between knowing someone will appear onstage later and knowing that, in a few minutes, you may actually be standing directly in front of them. A stage creates distance. A screen creates even more. A private meet-up removes both, and suddenly the person who has existed in clips, profile photos, livestreams and fan edits becomes a real human being occupying the same room.

I had imagined myself being composed. I am an adult, after all. I work in nursing. I have managed twelve-hour shifts, urgent situations, difficult conversations and moments where clear thinking actually matters. Surely I could manage a simple hello to someone I admired. This was, in retrospect, an extremely ambitious assumption.

Then I saw her.

And for a second, everything I had watched through a screen collapsed into one very ordinary, very extraordinary fact: Kai was actually there. Not on a stage yet. Not enlarged on a giant LED screen. Not inside a livestream. Not in an edit someone had uploaded minutes earlier.

Just Kai, standing there in front of me.

I supported the right artist.

The strangest part was how familiar and unfamiliar she felt at the same time. I recognised her immediately, of course, but seeing someone in person changes the scale of everything. The screen had always made her feel both close and far away. Now there was no glass, no buffering, no comment section, no pause button. There was just the reality of sharing the same space.

I remember feeling nervous, but not in the way I had expected. It was less about panic and more about the sudden awareness that this moment mattered to me. I had spent years supporting her, following her journey, celebrating her wins and working behind the scenes with other fans, and now all of that digital support had arrived at a physical point.

It felt strangely emotional. Not overwhelming in some cinematic sense. Just deeply satisfying. There was a moment when I looked at her and thought, very simply, I supported the right artist.

That feeling did not come from celebrity or popularity. It came from the way she carried herself in person, the warmth of the interaction, the sense that the girl people had been cheering for from afar was still recognisably human up close. There is always a little uncertainty when you admire someone through a screen because a public image can only show so much. Meeting her gave me a quiet reassurance that my support had not been misplaced.

I felt proud, but also relieved in a way I had not realised I needed to feel. The person matched the reason I had chosen to support her. That mattered. There are some fan moments that are loud because of excitement, and some that become meaningful because they confirm something you hoped was true. This was the second kind for me. I did not leave the meeting thinking I had discovered some secret version of her or suddenly knew everything about who she was. I simply came away with the comforting sense that the kindness and groundedness I had hoped to see were not absent once the cameras were gone.

That was enough.

I also had the chance to meet her mother, Tita Flor, and that unexpectedly became one of the warmest parts of the day. We come from the same place in Cebu, and there is something almost immediate about meeting another Cebuana far from home. A shared place name can collapse distance faster than any train ever could. There is a peculiar comfort in hearing familiar references while standing in Scotland. Glasgow can feel very far from Cebu until one conversation makes the map seem smaller. Her mother was warm and kind, and I remember feeling genuinely happy to meet the woman behind someone we had all spent so much time supporting. The interaction made the whole experience feel less like a celebrity moment and more like meeting people connected to home. Then came the hug.

There are photographs that explain themselves before you ever write a caption. In one of ours, we are smiling with the kind of expression that does not need much interpretation. I do not remember whether my hair was behaving or whether I said everything I had planned to say. I remember the warmth of the moment and the odd disbelief of thinking, This is actually happening. The bouquet was part of that too. I liked giving her something tangible after so much of my support had lived in digital spaces. Posts disappear down timelines. Stories expire. Livestreams end. Flowers, even briefly, can be held. That felt right. The funny thing is that after meeting her before the event, you might assume I would have become calmer during the actual performance. That would be a serious misunderstanding of fangirling.

By the time we reached Barrio Fiesta, the field was already alive with the familiar energy of a Filipino gathering abroad. Families had claimed patches of grass, folding chairs appeared in clusters, food travelled between hands, music carried from the stage and people were calling across the crowd in that unmistakable way Filipinos do when locating friends by volume remains more efficient than technology.

There were banners, flags, phones raised towards the stage and groups shifting around to find a better view. Scotland was still very much Scotland around us, but for a few hours a corner of it had become unmistakably Filipino.

I looked at her onstage and felt incredibly proud.

KAI MONTINOLA- BARRIO FIESTA SCOTLAND 2026

I was holding the banner proudly when Kai came onto the stage. And something in me shifted. I had already met her. I already had the photographs. I had already handed over the flowers. But seeing her perform in front of that crowd hit me differently. She was there in white, moving across the stage, with the giant screen behind her making every gesture larger. The music travelled over the field, people around me cheered, and I found myself gripping the banner while this ridiculous mixture of pride, happiness and disbelief rose in my chest. Then my eyes started to sting. The dangerous kind of emotion. Not the elegant movie version where one tear appears at the perfect angle and everybody looks beautiful. The real kind where you suddenly think, Oh no. I am actually going to cry here.

That kind of pride is difficult to explain without sounding slightly ridiculous, because the achievement was hers, not mine. I had not trained for the performance, travelled as the artist, stood under those lights or carried the pressure of being the person everyone was watching. And yet fans understand this particular kind of emotion. You watch someone grow, notice the difficult moments, celebrate the improvements, defend their potential before other people can see it and keep showing up in whatever small ways you can. Then one day you are standing in a crowd, watching that person do exactly what you always hoped she would get the chance to do, and something inside you simply says, Look at her. That was the feeling.

I was not emotional because I thought I had any claim to Kai’s success. I was emotional because I had believed in her, and there she was, giving me another reason to believe I had chosen the right artist to support. The banner in my hands suddenly felt heavier with meaning. It was no longer just fabric and print; it represented people who had cheered from different places, joined projects, shared updates, celebrated her milestones, defended her when support mattered and hoped she would continue growing into whatever kind of artist she wanted to become. For those few minutes in Glasgow, it felt as though I was carrying a small physical piece of all that support in my hands.

The photographs from the day preserve fragments of it: Kai onstage, the crowd behind us, the banner stretched between supporters, wristbands still attached, Ninin beside me and everyone caught inside their own version of the same afternoon. What the photographs cannot preserve is the sound of the crowd or that strange pressure behind your eyes when you realise you are trying very hard not to cry in public. They cannot record the precise second admiration turns into pride and pride becomes something you can actually feel in your chest. That part belongs to memory, and perhaps to the person who stood there feeling it.

Maybe that is why the day became so meaningful to me. It was not simply that I finally met Kai; it was that the meeting and the performance connected something that had previously existed mostly through screens, messages, projects and conversations. Supporting someone online can feel abstract because encouragement disappears into timelines, projects are coordinated from different places and milestones are watched from wherever you happen to be. In Glasgow, everything became physical. I handed over the flowers myself, stood beside her, met her mum, watched her perform with my own eyes and held the banner while she sang. Support suddenly had a place, a sound and a face standing only a few metres away.

That still amazes me because fandom can look ridiculous from the outside, and I am perfectly willing to admit that it can look ridiculous from the inside too. There are group chats containing enough messages to qualify as literature, debates over details nobody outside the fandom would notice, sudden changes, people awake at questionable hours and grown adults studying an event schedule with the seriousness usually reserved for government policy. I am aware of the comedy, but I am equally aware of the value hidden inside it. Somewhere among all that chaos are friendships, creativity, coordination, encouragement and the strange little community that forms when people from different places care about the same person.

The artist may be the reason everybody gathers, but the people gathered around her can become part of why the experience matters. Some of the people I have met through supporting Kai would never have crossed my path otherwise, and yet a shared interest turned usernames into conversations and conversations into actual friendships. That is one of the things fandom has given me that cannot be measured by views, trends or recognition.

At the same time, I still believe support needs boundaries. Admiring someone does not mean owning them, and being an admin does not make me entitled to access, recognition or private information. The healthiest kind of fandom, at least for me, leaves enough space for the artist to remain a person instead of turning her into a projection of what supporters want her to be. That was another reason meeting Kai felt so good: the moment did not need to become larger than it was in order to matter.

It was warm, brief and real. I had the chance to meet her, speak with her, meet her mum, give the gifts and walk away feeling even more certain that the person I had chosen to support was still someone I was happy to stand behind. I did not need the interaction to prove that I was special to her. What mattered was that meeting her in person confirmed something I had hoped from a distance: the admiration survived real life.

The day also reminded me of something I sometimes forget as an adult: enthusiasm is not something we are required to outgrow. A large part of my life is serious, and nursing asks for concentration, responsibility and emotional control in situations where those things genuinely matter. But I am not only the nurse. I am also the writer, the traveller, the woman who photographs food before eating it, the woman who can become personally offended by a delayed train and, apparently, the fangirl capable of finishing three night shifts, skipping sleep, crossing Britain, preparing gifts, meeting Kai and her mum, holding a banner, almost crying during a performance and then preparing to leave for another country shortly afterwards.

This is not a wellness recommendation, but it is an excellent story. By the end of the event, the exhaustion had started creeping back into my body because adrenaline can negotiate with sleep deprivation only for so long. My eyes were heavy again, my energy was thinning out and Norway was already waiting at the edge of the next few days, but I was happy in that wonderfully unsophisticated way that leaves you physically finished and mentally replaying the same handful of moments as though your brain has decided they deserve an encore.

Perhaps that is why this day matters so much to me. At the beginning of the story, I was leaving the hospital after three consecutive night shifts, thinking about trains, sleep and whether I had temporarily lost all respect for sensible decision-making. By the end of it, I understood exactly why I had gone. I travelled because I wanted to show up, and showing up changed the experience completely.

I thought fangirling would stay safely inside the group chat, contained within updates, projects, livestreams and the small glowing rectangles of our phones where enthusiasm can remain tidy and geographically convenient. Instead, it escaped. It became a train journey, a hotel room, Chinese food at an hour my body no longer understood, gifts packed carefully enough to survive international travel, a private meet-up, a fellow Cebuana in Glasgow, a bouquet in Kai’s hands, a hug, a banner held proudly in front of a stage and one very tired fangirl trying not to cry while thinking, Yes. I supported the right artist.

That is the thought I remember most clearly, not because meeting someone well known proved anything, but because meeting Kai in person confirmed the feeling I had already carried from a distance. The admiration did not shrink once the screen disappeared. It became warmer, more grounded and more human, and that mattered to me more than any perfect photograph or perfectly delivered sentence ever could.

So when I think back to that morning at the hospital after the third night shift, there is something almost funny about how unreasonable the whole plan looked. My body had been asking for sleep, the rota had offered me one tiny opening, Norway was waiting after Glasgow and the fangirl had exactly one argument: Kai is there. Apparently, that was enough then, and knowing everything I know now, it would still be enough. I would still catch the train.

Still glad the fangirl left the group chat,

Anj

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