The Woman Behind A Wanderful Sole:
A Trip Into Her Mind & Soul
HER SOCIAL HANDLES
Her Roots
She was named Keza by her mother and Marie was eventually added to it upon her gradmother’s request. Her father came from the family of Enriquez who hailed from Batangas and moved to Mindanao in late 1950’s. Her mother came from the native tribe of Davao called Mandaya. Her parents separated even before she was born. She is their only child. She spent her first 5 years doing what kids her age normally do. Play. Eat. Sleep. Be oblivious to the world. Be sweet and innocent.
She didn’t know what was it like to have siblings until she was five when she was moved to her father’s custody who at that time already had a family of his own. He had 3 boys and a pregnant wife. That’s when things started to get really difficult and at an early age, she knew how cruel the world could become to such a tiny soul like hers. She learnt about responsibility. Some are even way too much for a 5-year old. She wondered why all the time. She felt forsaken. Abandoned.
Note: Keza was a name her mother told her she found in a comic book while she was still pregnant with her. Years later out of envy of the other kids who were named Mary, Kris or what have you with them knowing the meaning of their names, this silly girl googled “Keza” and found that the name was originally from Rwanda which means “beautiful.” Interesting, isn’t it?
A mermaid yet she also yearns for the mountains
Her Education
She got her first taste of education in a public elementary school somewhere in North Cotabato in the island of Mindanao where she was called too many names by the other kids and she didn’t really know why. She remained unaffected by their bullying though (if that qualifies as bullying). Perhaps even back then, she already knew those dumbasses were not worth a moment of her time.
Her high school was a series of roller coaster events, with her studying in a private all-girls school run by nuns, that limited her actions and defined her behavior. She struggled with her studies and family issues. This is when she was in turmoil within herself, a living time bomb ready to explode at any moment and be at her worst. She managed to survive though. Credits to her well-chosen friends from whom she felt the warmth and encouragement outside the suffocating walls of her home.
College was such a challenge for her. She took up Accountancy when all she wanted was Interior Design or Architecture. She didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t send herself to school nor she had the courage to disobey her father. She eventually quit Accountancy and went on to graduate with a different business degree. She was so full of it. It made her so sick that she didn’t wanna have anything to do with it. She was just glad that chapter of her life was finally over.
Her difficulties and sorrows made her strong, indestructible
Life After School
With her not so amenable relationship with her family beginning to take a toll on her, she booked a ticket and sailed to Manila at the first chance she got. She ran away. She needed to escape the situation she was in before it consumed her. She ran away from her parents’ expectations. From the pressure involved being the eldest child and the added responsibilities it came with. She ran away from her first love. She felt she was too young to take romantic relationships seriously. She just wanted to be on her own. To feel what it’s like to be free. To be her own woman. To make her own decisions and suffer the consequences. She wanted to test the waters and see what it makes out of her. She just really wanted not to care. To be selfish.
She works as a call center agent since. She has been with 3 reputable companies so far. Guess part of the reason why she didn’t take college seriously and finished it off just for the heck of it is the fact that she knew full well she would work in a call center. Not that call center jobs are no-brainers, it’s just what she knew she would do. Just like many people, she fell for the same mistake of thinking call center jobs are easy but what she found out blew her mind and changed the way she perceives the industry.
Working in a call center has challenged her to lengths she didn’t imagine. Yet she loves every minute of it. She loves coming across new problems each and every day. She loves the fulfillment of coming up with a resolution to each problems she has the opportunity to handle. She loves being able to appease overly disappointed customers (those kind of customers other agents would rather hung up on) and turn them to trust her in the end. She just loves it. Maybe because it isn’t boring. It stimulates her brain, sorta giving her a rush of adrenaline.
She also finds people working in call center to be one of the smartest and funniest people you’ll ever work with. They are graduates of Journalism, Political Science, Nursing and whatnot yet they troubleshoot and do technical stuff. Some of them are handling treasury, stock trading, insurance, finance and credit management, sales and all of the other stuff they didn’t know about before coming to work in a call center but they do a pretty good job at it. They are non-IT graduates and had not taken up any computer-related courses yet they fix and deal with HTML and XML files. Not to mention, most of them are good-looking too. Lol.
She has broken her heart one to many times but she just has so much love to give
How she came to create this blog
Writing is something she is passionate among all other things she enjoys doing. Not that she is a figure of literary importance to be reckoned with but she can the least put words together enough for people to understand. She started writing when she was in 3rd grade. She writes poems and short stories. It was when in highschool that she started writing stories about the characters in her drawings. People who got to read her work responded positively and that was good enough motivation for her to know exactly where she wants her path to lead to.
Then college came. She still gets to write but only in competitions and her thesis projects. When she graduated, she became too preoccupied with work and earning her some bucks to support herself and occasionally her family. She deviated her love for putting fragments of her imagination together to reading someone else’s. It wasn’t until 2011 that she got to put her writing ability to good use.
She had just broken up with her then boyfriend of almost 3 years and writing sort of became her therapy. That failed relationship caused her life an unexpected turn for the worse. It was entirely shattered. She, broken into shards of glass that was too impossible for her to put back together. She was barely holding on. She had way too many nightmares. She sleeps only for an hour and stays wide awake for the rest of the day. Her heart always beating fast causing her to feel something inexplicably unbearable. Was it her heart bleeding? She would ask. She had never been heartbroken before. She didn’t know how to deal with it. She would be lucky to have survived another day of the longest days of her life. What made it even worse is her never-fading hope that not a second would pass without her hoping he would come knocking the door of her apartment, that he would call or simply send her a text message asking how she is. She couldn’t cry no matter how much she wanted to. Tears just wasn’t there cause she still hoped. And during her worst moment of playing everything that happened in repeat almost causing her to lose her mind, she started writing.
Writing has paved a way to her sanity. When she was losing it from overanalyzing things, she would read through what she wrote and little by little she came to realize everything was out of her control and that probably it happened for a reason. She may not know for what reason it may be at that time but she trusted it was for the better of her. Whenever her grief pulls her back to that dark abyss she fell herself into, she would write.
She created a free hosted blog which she entitled “A Diary Of A Broken Heart” then went on to write about the man who broke her. She wrote about her pain and how much she resented him. She wrote about her regrets and what she could have done to prevent them. She wrote about their happy times together and how much she wanted to turn the now back to those times she and him were still happy. She wrote how she forgave him and how fate wasn’t just at their side. She wrote about them not meant for each other and how she had come to accept that. She wrote until she couldn’t write anything more upon finding herself several miles far from the weak vulnerable girl that she was when he left.
She has gotten over her heartbreak. She has gotten over that one thing which prompted writing to be an essential part of her being once more. But, the inspiration didn’t stop there. She went on to write about other stuff. Food. Fashion. People. Her 5 Cents of Thoughts about life and the society. Then one day, it hit her. Why doesn’t she write about that one thing she loves to do most. Travel.
Traveling has opened her eyes to the beauty amidst the chaos of the world
How she came up with A Wanderful Sole
Imagine how difficult it is to think of the best name for your blog, with you spending hours and hours of your every day thoroughly thinking through it, even skipping meals just for the heck of it. Imagine your frustration when you thought you finally figure it out only to find out it was already taken by someone else. Imagine yourself wanting to smash your computer wide open as you will need to spend several days again thinking about the best name you could call your website with only a handful of brain cells left and the same thing happens over and over. This was her for weeks.
In all those days she looked like a completely lost sheep trying to vie its way back to its herd with no success. She went from choosing words that didn’t sound right when put together as “Nomadic Kez”, ‘Travelling Keza, or “Wandering Marie” to names that are too common they’re all over the place as in “Lakwatsera, Biyahera and what have you.” Worse, those examples mentioned above were already being used by some well-established bloggers and she didn’t want to seem like a copycat. Hence, she tried not to be too conventional.
She thought about coming up with a name that is somehow poetic like Foot on the loose, One Girl Big World, Solitary Wanderer, Girl Astray, and A Wanderful Life. All those names sounded perfect. The problem is, first. Every single one of them was already taken. Second, she doesn’t want people to think that her blog is about escaping life’s reality by traveling. She wants to let people know that traveling brings out the better in them. That it opens people to brand new perspectives as they learn more about culture and the world. That traveling is not a means of escape but to truly find or make oneself.
That’s when she came up with “A Wanderful Sole”.
It was supposedly “A Wonderful Soul” but she tweaked it a little to “A Wanderful Sole” to make it more relevant to what she’s writing about in her blog.
She strongly believes that to travel is to find or make the better version of yourself. That the more she lets herself lost into off-beaten paths and places unknown to her, the more she discovers things about her. Things that she didn’t know she had all along. The good and the bad. The ones she needs to lose and those she needs to nurture. What she’s capable of. Her limitations. Her fears. Her aspirations.
She believes that to travel is to never stop learning. That there is so much to see. So much more to be done. Learning paves way for brand new insights. With new insights comes a new perspective. Perspectives often turn into advocacy. And advocacy requires actions.
What she wants to let people see is how travel will make her grow from a totally naive little sapling to a formidable fortress within a vast forest. That her travels will one day become an inspiration to many to discover the world more. That it isn’t so bad to deviate from the normal and try something different.
She doesn’t have a pattern in mind as it might as well change from time to time. She may be a scattered brain but she would try to write all about her travels wholeheartedly and with all honesty. She would never be ashamed to reveal all about her mistakes and will always share what she did to be better.
If one day she seemed all pro when she writes about something, just imagine that it’s just the version of her trying to conceal her embarrassment by acting a know-it-all after trying and failing for the Nth time before finally getting it right. 
She's bent but never broken. Maybe unbothered but will always pour her heart out to those she loves