Brick By Brick

Trauma, Resilience, and the Search for Home.

What was it all for?

A Memoir of Endurance, Healing, and Becoming.

Brick by Brick is written not only as a story, but as a reflection. Through footnotes, Anna offers readers a second layer — naming covert abuse tactics, exploring ADHD, and tracing the psychology of recovery, endurance as a trauma response, and using concepts from Narrative Therapy to reframe the story. These notes invite the reader into her process of making sense, brick by brick.

Synopsis

When a doctor pointed to the cysts on her knee scan and said, “We all only have so much money in the bank. There isn’t much left,” Anna Hertel heard more than a prognosis. For years, triathlon had been the scaffold that held her together after two abusive relationships left her stripped down. The thought of losing it filled her with panic.

Brick by Brick traces her journey across continents and finish lines — from survival in coercive relationships to endurance on the race course, and toward the slow, layered work of recovery. More than a memoir of sport, it is a story about what it means to lose and rebuild, and how healing — like endurance — is built one brick at a time.

More than a memoir of sport, it is a story about what it means to lose and rebuild, to confront trauma and resilience, and to discover that healing — like endurance — is built one brick at a time.

Themes

Brick by Brick explores:

  • Survival and recovery after coercive relationships.

  • Endurance sport as scaffold and metaphor.

  • Trauma, ADHD, and identity reconstruction.

  • The search for belonging, especially as a third-culture kid.

  • Exploring the concept of Becoming.

  • The power of story itself, as both survival and re-authoring.

Unique Element: Footnotes

Why Footnotes?
Brick by Brick is written not only as a story, but as a reflection. Through footnotes, Anna reveals what was hidden in the moment: the mechanics of coercive control, the echoes of ADHD, and the process of reclaiming narrative. These notes invite readers into her journey of making sense, brick by brick.

Excerpt:

Tears fell onto the paper. I blotted them quickly, not wanting to appear overly emotional. But a nagging feeling of unease lingered. Why was I apologizing for being who I was? For my family, my upbringing? A part of me screamed that this was wrong, that I deserved better. But another part, the part terrified of losing him, urged me to submit, to appease, to become whatever he wanted me to be. This felt extreme, but maybe he was right. Maybe my sheltered upbringing had blinded me to the severity of my actions. Desperate to regain his affection, I slipped the letter under the door to his piano room.[1] That night he came to bed, but he wouldn't touch me. I cried myself to sleep. I am unlovable. I am alone. I feel abandoned. Even now, knowing all I know, that silence that I felt that night still echoes.

[1] In this scene, a common abusive cycle unfolds: Rupture, shame, and conditional approval. Wilhelm magnifies a small mistake into a moral failure, forcing Anna into endless self-blame. This tactic — known as gaslighting — trains survivors to over-apologize, erase their own histories and values, and believe they must earn love through submission. It creates a trauma bond that feels impossible to escape.

At the time, I didn’t know I had ADHD. But looking back, I see how my heightened rejection sensitivity, emotional overwhelm, and people-pleasing, masked as survival, made it almost impossible to distinguish shame from danger. I didn’t think I was being manipulated — I thought I was failing.

Tactics at work: Preemptive isolation, public shaming, silent treatment, manufactured guilt, gaslighting, financial shaming, forced self-erasure, trauma bond reinforcement. (Stark, 2007; Herman, 1992; Ramsay & Rostain, 2015; Maté, 2022).