Malala Yousafzai recalls trauma resurfacing after smoking weed during Oxford university years

In an exclusive extract from her upcoming memoir, Nobel laureate and activist Malala Yousafzai recounts a harrowing experience at Oxford University, where smoking a bong triggered vivid flashbacks to the moment she was shot by the Taliban. The excerpt, published by The Guardian, details how what began as a casual night with friends turned into a distressing confrontation with buried trauma.

Yousafzai writes that she had been struggling to concentrate on her studies when a friend invited her to relax at a campus hangout known as “the shack.” There, she joined a small group of students experimenting with marijuana. After inhaling from a bong for the first time, she began to experience intense disorientation and time lapses. Soon, she found herself physically paralyzed and overwhelmed by memories from 2012, when she was attacked by a Taliban gunman for advocating girls’ education in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

In the memoir, Yousafzai describes the terrifying sensation of being “trapped inside [her] body,” reliving the shooting and subsequent coma in graphic mental detail. She recalls collapsing on a dorm floor as her friend Anisa tried to calm her, while flashbacks of blood, gunfire, and chaos replayed in her mind.

The incident, she explains, forced her to confront memories she had long suppressed. “People always asked what I remembered of the shooting,” she writes. “I told them my brain erased it — but now I knew it wasn’t true.”

The extract offers an unflinching look at Yousafzai’s post-traumatic experiences and the long-term psychological scars of violence. Her memoir, which expands on her recovery and journey into adulthood, is set to be released later this year.