Malala Yousafzai Shares Candid Memory of Shooting After Bong Use
Yousafzai at Women of the World Festival, 2014. Photo source: Southbank Centre on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai disclosed that smoking cannabis at Oxford University triggered a horrible flashback of the Taliban attack which almost took her life in 2012. The assassination attempt left her in a coma for a week, and for a long time she believed her brain had erased all those memories.
While cannabis is regularly used by veterans of war to heal PTSD, the incident involving Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai attests that sometimes trauma can persist and might even be triggered by the very same remedies that people use to overcome it.
The Pakistani-born activist wrote about the unpleasant experience she had with cannabis in a new memoir — an exclusive extract from the book was published by The Guardian.
The experience, that involved smoking weed from a bong, kindled a lucid recollection of the shooting, which Malala believed her mind had obliterated from memory.
After Trying Cannabis, the Nobel Laureate Revisited the Moment She Was Shot
As Malala told it, everything happened after she joined a student hangout called “the shack.” It wasn’t her first time smoking marijuana, but this time it proved to be a very gloomy circumstance.
A friend in the group passed around a bong, and she accepted it. “Fine, why not? I’m already out here, might as well have a new college experience,” she thought to herself.
After two rounds of the bong, and chatter that lasted until 1 am, she found her “legs felt heavy and rooted to the ground” on her way back to the dorms. Next thing that happened, she passed out and comprehended a sensation of “terror of being trapped inside my body.” “This has happened before,” she wrote.
“Suddenly I was 15 years old again, lying on my back under a white sheet; a tube running down my throat, eyes closed. For seven days, as doctors tended to my wounds, I was in a coma. From the outside, I looked to be in a deep sleep. But, inside, my mind was awake,” she revealed.
The unfiltered images of her attempted assassination — including how a man with a gun approaches — flashed in her mind over and over, according to the written account. She would spend the rest of the night shaking and awake, out of fear to never wake up again if she falls asleep.
It was during the next morning when Malala realized she had unbolted memories she thought were lost. “In the hospital, when I had finally come out of the coma, I had no memory of what had happened,” she wrote. Over the years, when asked what she remembered from the shooting, she would tell everyone that her brain had erased those particular memories. “But now, I knew it wasn’t true. I had seen it all, and the memories were still lurking in my brain, years later,” she said.
Malala’s revelation reminds us that healing isn’t always linear, or conventional, so to speak. The body can obviously still process trauma long after physical recovery. Recollections can happen even when you least expect them.
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Stephen Andrews
