Malala Yousafzai

Inside, I screamed.

Outside, my lips stayed closed, motionless.

I was awake and buried, alive in the coffin of my body.

The Bong incident, you know, just turned out to be an experience not that I had imagined.

I had heard cool things about it.

And of course, you know, like it's different for everybody.

But I think in my case, there was this unaddressed trauma.

The memory, the visuals, everything, I think, had been there.

My brain had tried to suppress them because, you know, it's just a moment of fear that you do not want to see again.

And when the bong incident happened, my body froze, and I was reliving the Taliban attack.

You know, I could see the gunmen.

I thought, this is happening all over again.

I often say that I received my surgeries and I recovered so quickly from the Taliban attack.

But just when this happened, I realized that maybe I actually had not fully recovered.

There was this unaddressed part of my recovery, which was mental health, which was the trauma that we did not actually count in the treatment process.

It was frightening.

And even now, when I think about it, it's a really frightening place to be in.

You feel trapped.

You do not see a way out.

That's exactly what I was going through in those days.