When The Guardian recently published an exclusive extract from Malala Yousafzai’s new memoir, in which she candidly recounts smoking a bong in Oxford and revisiting the trauma of being shot by the Taliban, it sent shockwaves through liberal arts group chats across the country. Suddenly, Malala wasn’t just a distant Nobel laureate, she was one of us. She’d done a uni thing.
I especially feel drawn to her — I like to think I embody the same ideal of female participation in education that Malala stood for (except maybe that one time I convinced my girlies to start skipping 9am lectures). Really, the only difference is my secondary-school activism peaked when I started a petition to make bubble tea available in the canteen.
Anyway, for those of us whose main source of trauma comes from student housing rather than militant extremism, here are ten flashbacks you can have after a bong hit that don’t involve the Taliban, and probably won’t get you a Guardian feature or Nobel Peace Prize.
1. Being forced to network at a careers fair while high.
You came for the free tote bag and pen, but now you’re trapped explaining your “interest in fintech” to a Deloitte recruiter whose face you can’t even make out.
2. That time your group project partner submitted 2,000 words of gibberish because “it’s avant-garde.”
You spend the evening questioning whether academia is a cruel performance art, or if they were trying to out-Joyce Ulysses.
3. Getting an email from Student Finance with the subject line, “Update to your application.”
The true face of terror — your heart stops before you even open it. For a moment you genuinely consider dropping out and becoming a barista in Lisbon.
4. Accidentally setting off the fume hood alarm during your chemistry practical.
You watch the technician walk over without saying anything, and somehow that’s worse than being yelled at. He ignores you when you try to explain it was “just a minor reaction”. The smell of burnt plastic follows you for the rest of the week.
5. Being ghosted by a man who quoted Foucault in bed.
Every puff brings back the smell of clove cigarettes and a dissertation on power relations. In hindsight, you realise he probably just wanted to be tied up with your scarf.
6. The day your landlord raised rent by £400 and called it “indexing”.
You think you can hear the letting agent whisper “market forces” in your ear whenever you close your eyes.
7. Spending 12 hours debugging a single line of assembly code.
You change one register name and everything collapses again. At some point you start to believe the processor has personal beef with you. By the time it works, you’ve forgotten what the program was supposed to do.
8. That time you accidentally joined the UCL Marxist Society Discord and couldn’t find your way out.
“Hey, comrade, are you coming to the reading group?” still echoes in your head. The acronyms for every micro-strain of Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism now swirl in your head like a dialectical migraine.
9. When you realised Tesco’s just raised the price of their Meal Deal for the fourth time.
You fall onto your knees before the gods of Austerity, clutching your £3.85 pasta combo. At this point the Meal Deal is basically its own cost-of-living index.
10. Realising your “trauma narrative” isn’t exactly a Guardian feature waiting to happen.
You briefly consider pitching your life story, then remember your formative essay on postcolonial trauma is due Monday, your Meal Deal went up again, and the closest you’ll get to a Nobel Prize is surviving your chemistry practical without setting off the fume hood.
