When Malala Yousafzai was eleven, she started writing an anonymous blog for the BBC’s Urdu site. Under the heading “I am afraid,” she wrote about her nightmares of being too scared to go to school because of the Taliban in her Swat Valley. She kept speaking up anyway. On October 9, 2012, two Taliban gunmen stopped her school bus, asked for her by name, and shot her. She was fifteen. She was flown to Peshawar, then to intensive care in Birmingham, England. By March 2013 she was back in school. On her sixteenth birthday she spoke at the United Nations. At seventeen she became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s deciding fear doesn’t get the final say.
