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Journalism of Courage
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai has said that smoking weed while studying at Oxford University triggered flashbacks of the Taliban attack in which she was shot in 2012. The account appears in an exclusive extract published by The Guardian from her new memoir, Finding My Way (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025) .
The extract, titled “How smoking a bong brought back the trauma of being shot by the Taliban,” was published on October 12, and describes an incident that occurred when Yousafzai was a student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
According to the extract, the episode began as she was attempting to write an economics essay. The question she had been assigned was, “Explain how the time inconsistency of optimal monetary policy can lead to a stabilisation bias. How would the introduction of a price path target help to address it?”
Yousafzai writes that she read the question multiple times but could not understand it. After several attempts to focus, she received a message from a friend, which prompted her to take a break. She left her college room late in the evening and walked across to a small structure known to students as “the shack.”
Inside, Yousafzai found her friend sitting with two male students from the business course. They were seated around what she described as a “clear glass container [that] had a smaller glass tube poking out at the base and looked like something nicked from the chemistry lab.”
“I heard a bubbling sound and he disappeared behind a cloud of smoke. The smell answered my question,” Yousafzai writes.
She identified the object as a bong — a device commonly used to smoke cannabis. The extract describes that after Yousafzai inhaled, she experienced a sudden and distressing reaction. The smoke, she writes, triggered a powerful flashback to the 2012 Taliban shooting.
In that attack, Yousafzai, then 15 years old, was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman while travelling home from school in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. She was targeted for her public advocacy for girls’ education. The shooting sparked international condemnation and led to widespread support for her recovery. She was later flown to the United Kingdom for treatment and went on to continue her education there.
The Guardian extract recounts that the experience of smoking weed brought back memories of the shooting, creating a vivid and frightening flashback. Yousafzai does not describe the physical details of the reaction but refers to it as a “terrifying” recurrence of trauma linked to that event.
The passage provides a rare glimpse into Yousafzai’s life as a university student and her continuing process of recovery from the attack.
Her memoir will be her second major book following I Am Malala, which was published in 2013 and detailed her early life, activism, and the events leading up to the Taliban attack.
In Finding My Way, Yousafzai moves beyond the events of the shooting to describe her private challenges — nearly failing exams, getting ghosted by dates, and learning to balance activism with ordinary student life. The memoir also recounts her experiences of friendship, romance, and recovery.
The publisher’s summary reads: “How do you rebuild yourself when your whole world changes overnight? Thrust onto the public stage at fifteen years old after the Taliban’s brutal attack on her life, Malala quickly became an international icon known for bravery and resilience. But away from the cameras and crowds, she spent years struggling to find her place in an unfamiliar world.”
Yousafzai’s publisher describes the memoir as tracing her path “from high school loner to reckless college student to a young woman at peace with her past.” The book includes “candid, often messy moments” that reveal the challenges of growing up under global scrutiny.
A review excerpt published by Oprah Daily calls the memoir “a messy, endearingly awkward and disarmingly relatable coming-of-age.” It adds: “This is Malala unfiltered, and she makes courage feel like something we can all reach for.”
Malala Yousafzai became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2014, recognised for her campaign for girls’ education in Pakistan and globally. Since graduating from Oxford University, she has continued to advocate for education and women’s rights through the Malala Fund, the non-profit organisation she co-founded.
(The extract “How smoking a bong brought back the trauma of being shot by the Taliban” by Malala Yousafzai was first published in The Guardian on October 12, 2025.)
