Imagine moving half-way across the world as a teenager, from a school where you had loads of friends to one where nobody seems to want you in their group.
Then, when you go to university and finally get to make friends and have a degree of personal freedom, because it’s all so new to you, you become overwhelmed by the demands on your time.
All this would be tough enough for a girl from an average background, but Malala Yousafzai’s experiences are anything but average.
Shot in the head by the Taliban at the age of 15 for campaigning for girls’ education rights, rather than hide away, the teen from the Swat Valley in Pakistan ramped up her activism as soon as she was able, receiving a Nobel Peace Prize two years later.
While the world knows about her public activities and challenges, such as her work at the helm of the Malala Fund, which supports other activists in this field, and the many surgeries she’s had following the assassination attempt, few of us had been aware of the loneliness she experienced after moving to Birmingham.
Or indeed what a playful and fun-loving character Malala is.
It’s all detailed in her revealing new book, Finding My Way, which she’s on tour to promote. ‘I wanted to share the more personal side of my life because my story has been in the public eye for a very long time and people have perceptions about the life of an activist,’ Malala, who’s now 28, tells Metro. ‘But I’m human, and activism is just one part of my life.’
The social contrast between her childhood in Mingora and school in Birmingham couldn’t be more stark. ‘In Pakistan, I was a hard-working student, but I was also mischievous. My friends and I would sign up for every competition and activity, and we loved performing skits on stage.
‘I remember one time a teacher telling me maybe we should just focus on one thing and not sign up for every single competition. We were overconfident. We thought we were extremely good at everything, but we really weren’t,’ she adds with a laugh.
While in the privacy of her bedroom in Birmingham, Malala would practice her hip hop moves and sing along to Taylor Swift, whom she still idolises; at school, she struggled with the social rejection.
‘It was very difficult for me,’ she recalls. ‘I began to internalise things and think that nobody at high school wanted to be friends with me because I was either too boring or too serious.’
So when Malala started at the University of Oxford in 2017, making friends was her priority – something she ‘wanted more than anything’. She quickly developed a tight circle of pals, and started having the sort of fun that any student would – albeit with security detail in tow.
The teenage student signed up for loads of societies during freshers’ week, had a go at rowing (later receiving online death threats and a barrage of criticism because she was papped wearing jeans that day), and regularly climbed onto the roof of her college at midnight.
She attended several balls, went clubbing, got blocked on Instagram by her friend’s ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend when attempting to snoop, and even tried drugs – but more on that later.
One of her rites of passage was falling for a bad boy – a good-looking guy whose extra-curricular activities suggested might have sailed close to the wind legally. Like so many other young women have done, Malala spent a few months thinking she could fix him.
‘I thought maybe my help was what he needed, that I could help him change his life, but I don’t think he was interested at all,’ she says. ‘I realised he was just talking to me to get some free food.’
And while her earliest forays into something approaching romance might not have played out as hoped, it turned out that she was pretty good at giving her friends relationship advice. Laughing again, she attributes this talent to having watched too many Bollywood movies.
Due to the academic demands placed on them, Oxford students aren’t supposed to have jobs outside of university, and, at first, Malala didn’t really regard her speaking engagements – some of them international – as work.
But it quickly became apparent that something had to give, particularly when her supervisor said she wasn’t living up to her potential; that was something, as an education activist, that terrified her.
She asked her supervisor to write a letter forbidding her from public engagements while at university, and knuckled down on her degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, along the way learning for the first time how to juggle the competing demands of university and socialising, while coming to terms with her mental health.
Taking a hit on a bong at university triggered long-suppressed emotions in Malala, who doesn’t remember exactly what happened on the day of the shooting.
She recently wrote in an Instagram post about the experience: ‘My college friends were doing bong hits, and I joined them. Later that night, I had my first flashbacks of being shot in the head, terrifying images that ran through my brain on a loop.
‘I couldn’t turn it off, and spent hours on the floor, shaking and screaming. It was the start of a long mental health journey, one that I’m still on today.’
The experience caused Malala to start having panic attacks, and eventually she decided to seek help from a therapist who, unsurprisingly, diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder and helped her with coping strategies.
Starting therapy, she admits, changed her life.
Given that Malala is so often spoken of in the same breath as climate activist Greta Thunberg – and not always in a positive light, with some corners of the internet viciously pitting the two young women against each other – it’s natural to wonder how she feels about comparisons made between them.
‘I’ve spent my whole life being compared with somebody, and I don’t think Greta thinks comparisons should be part of the conversation either,’ Malala explains. ‘What we both have is a goal to uplift the voices of the voiceless and to bring justice for them.
‘People who follow Greta and believe in her activism should amplify what she is doing. I’m focused on girls’ education, and I speak for children everywhere who are denied their education, whether that’s because of schools being bombed in Gaza or Pakistan, or girls in Afghanistan being banned from learning.
Those of us who truly believe in justice for everybody should not be tearing each other down.’
One of the many sweet aspects of her book is her account of meeting and falling in love with fellow cricket fan Asser Malik, and how the equality and mutual respect within their relationship helped Malala come round to seeing why marriage might actually be something she’d be interested in.
The couple, who now live in London, celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary this month.
In sharing the sometimes messy details of her personal life (including hinting that she still struggles to say no to her strong-willed mother, who once swatted Prince Harry’s hand away from her daughter’s arm during a photo shoot), Malala echoes something she told the girls at a school she founded: ‘You don’t have to be a perfect person to prove yourself worthy of your rights.’
Malala will be visiting the Assembly Roomsin Edinburgh, on November 30 2025, as part of her book tour. Click here for tickets.