Marikit Alonzo has a gift for seeing what people are trying not to say. She is direct, sharp-eyed, and allergic to performances that ask others to pretend. Raised in Pasig, Metro Manila, she grew up in a family that prized practicality. If you had a problem, you solved it. If you were tired, you worked anyway. Marikit learned early how to function, and then, later, she learned how to question why functioning was treated as a moral virtue. That second lesson is the root of her writing.
She studied psychology and earned a BW in Psychology, then pursued CHRA credentials to deepen her understanding of workplace systems. While some people enter HR with the goal of smoothing everything over, Marikit entered with a desire to understand power. Who gets protected, and by what policies. Who gets labeled “difficult,” and who gets labeled “leadership material,” for doing the same behavior. She began her career in HR roles that exposed her to the gap between official values and daily practice. She worked in a corporate office in Bonifacio Global City where posters about “well-being” hung above desks where people ate lunch in ten minutes. She kept track of the language people used to justify unreasonable workloads. She noticed how often the burden of “team culture” fell on the most exhausted employees.
At first, writing was simply a way to stay sane. Marikit kept a private document of observations, half diary, half field notes. She wrote about meeting etiquette, about the performance of professionalism, about the way some managers used praise as a leash. She wrote about burnout not as a personal failure but as an expected outcome of systems that treated people as replaceable. Eventually she began to publish shorter essays online, using humor as a blade and a balm. People shared her posts because they felt seen, and because she named things they had been told not to name.
Marikit’s freelance career grew through persistence and a refusal to be vague. She pitched stories that took workplace issues seriously without turning them into motivational content. She wrote explainers about boundaries, labor rights, and mental health at work, always insisting on context. She is the writer who will ask an editor, “Who benefits from this advice?” and then build the piece around the answer. Her psychology training helps her understand behavior, but her HR credentials help her understand the incentives that shape behavior. She does not excuse harmful systems, but she can explain them clearly, which is often more unsettling than outrage.
Her reporting has taken her to places across the Philippines where the story changes depending on the street you are on. In Makati, she interviewed young professionals who described living in condos that felt like storage units, commuting in traffic that turned days into endurance tests, and trying to practice self-care that never touched the root problem. She took notes in Legazpi Active Park, watching people eat lunch under trees and wondering how many of them were thinking about their inbox. In Iloilo City, she spent time speaking with workers in hospitality and retail, hearing about customer service as emotional labor. The conversations shifted her understanding of burnout, showing her how it looks when wages are low and expectations are high. In Baguio, she attended a small workshop for community volunteers and wrote about care work, the kind that is unpaid but essential.
Marikit also has experience that sits at the edge of journalism and organizational work. She spent time as a communications writer for a training center in Mandaluyong that offered leadership programs for first-time managers. The job was to make the material sound engaging, but Marikit treated it like an investigation. She listened to how managers talked when they believed they were being “transparent,” and she noticed how often transparency meant shifting pressure downward. Later she worked as a consultant for a small startup in Quezon City, helping them write a code of conduct that included real accountability. She learned that policies can be powerful, but only if someone is willing to enforce them, and only if leadership agrees to be inconvenienced.
Her voice is distinct. It is candid, sometimes funny, sometimes blunt, and always pointed at the real issue. She uses examples readers recognize, because she wants clarity, not abstraction. She can write a serious essay about mental health that still includes a line that makes you laugh, not to soften the truth, but to make it easier to swallow so you can keep reading. Marikit is not interested in being “inspiring.” She is interested in being useful. She believes usefulness often requires honesty that is slightly uncomfortable.
Despite her edge, Marikit is not a cynic. People mistake her for one because she refuses to dress up reality. But she does believe in improvement. She believes in better workplaces, better boundaries, better language for what is happening to us. She is particularly passionate about early-career workers, interns, and anyone who has been taught to accept disrespect as a rite of passage. She writes for the people who have been told they are too sensitive, too dramatic, too much, when the truth is they have simply noticed something that others would rather ignore.
Marikit’s personal routines are practical, almost stubbornly so. She keeps a strict budget spreadsheet because freelancing taught her that peace is partially logistical. She works best in the morning and avoids late-night writing because it turns her brain into a courtroom. She likes places where she can think without being observed, such as the National Library of the Philippines in Ermita or a quiet cafe in Marikina where the staff does not hover. She takes long walks when she is angry, because movement prevents her from writing the kind of sentence that feels satisfying but solves nothing.
Marikit Alonzo is a freelance writer with psychology training and HR credentials, but her real expertise is in naming the dynamic under the dynamic. She writes about work, mental health, and relationships with a focus on power and context. Her stories do not offer simple fixes, because she does not believe simple fixes are respectful. Instead, she offers something harder and often more helpful: clear language, sharp analysis, and the reminder that if your workplace is making you feel like a problem, it might be because the system needs you to doubt yourself in order to keep running.
