Malala Yousafzai

How do we fix it?

And she took a deep breath and she said, you know, this is not how therapy works.

And she told me that I had PTSD.

and anxiety.

And this was like the first time that I actually heard the word PTSD.

You know, people, I had come up, like I had heard it in a few different contexts, but I thought, you know, okay, I faced a trauma, but I think I don't have PTSD.

But seven years later, the PTSD appeared.

And, you know, I learned something that

When people talk about, like, a traumatic experience, it's not necessary that PTSD or the mental health issues appear immediately.

They could appear seven years later, ten years later.

Like, you never know.

And that happened in my case.

I mean, growing up, I had seen many girls lose the opportunity to complete their education and just their dreams to become a doctor, engineer, because they were married off.

So marriage, that was the last thing I wanted to think about.

I did not want to get married.

It was like it was it was not a cool thing.

If you wanted to have a future as a girl, you wanted to keep yourself away from marriage for as long as you could, because even later in your life, it just meant like more compromises for women that, you know, you had to readjust to the husband's family and you just had to pray that the husband turns out to be a nice, respectful person.

I remember when I was thinking about marriage for myself,

I put myself in my mom's shoes for the first time.

I had never thought about anything from her perspective before.