Malala Yousafzai is my screensaver.

I’m dead serious. Whenever I’m sick of financial accounting, too tired for literature, or buried under marketing notes, I glance at her face and can almost hear her say, “One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.”

It’s hard to roll your eyes at someone who took a bullet for education.

In the West, Malala Yousafzai is treated almost like a living saint—and how could she not be? At 15, on her way to school, she was shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to believe girls deserved an education. Two years and one day later, she became the youngest person to ever receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, she has only become more revered. Or has she?

I recently listened to an episode of the NPR podcast Code Switch titled “Why Malala Yousafzai is a leader in the West but not back home.” It offered some thought-provoking insights. Many of her fellow Pakistanis see her as a kid who leveraged getting shot to gain fame. Some think the shooting was a conspiracy and that she is a mouthpiece for Western interests.

​At first, I sprang to her defense. She’s clearly a hero—courageous, principled, and miraculously alive. In hindsight, though, it is easy to see why— after so much foreign intervention— many Pakistanis would be wary of Western praise of narratives. 

The podcast mentioned that she co-produced the broadway show Suffs, about—you guessed it—the women’s suffrage movement.

​Her co-producer? Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state who approved CIA drone strikes in Pakistan from 2009 to 2014, killing thousands. Their partnership left me uneasy, even a little taken aback. It felt like a forced PR stunt.

But it wasn’t forced. A Pakistani activist had willingly joined forces with a politician associated with indirectly taking Pakistani lives. 

Suddenly, I understood why many in Pakistan might feel betrayed. The fact that Malala has lived in Birmingham, England, since the attack and only visits Pakistan under heavy security seems to add insult to injury. Wouldn’t little girls back home be understandably confused by how someone who speaks so fiercely for their rights doesn’t live among them?

​Her foundation, the Malala Fund, has undeniably done marvelous work with the Pakistani government to promote girls’ education. Her achievements, however, are overshadowed by an intense and deeply personal backlash. In a country shaped by regime changes and foreign hands, skepticism runs deeper than admiration. To many, she is still an expat, still “whitewashed.”

​Like any public figure, especially one so adored and so detested, Yousafzai faces criticism from both directions: for doing too much—forgiving Clinton’s war crimes—and for doing too little—posting about Gaza only 40 times on social media and donating a modest $800,000 to aid relief. (Apparently, some expected her on the battlefield instead.)

Yet, despite these contradictions, my admiration for her didn’t fade.

​People say you should never meet your heroes. I’ve yet to meet Yousafzai, but I’m glad to understand her more fully. She’s still my screensaver. Because why shouldn’t we look up to people who’ve made mistakes? I can recognize her errors, but it’s incredibly difficult to condemn a woman who has been held to impossible standards since she was a child.

​There’s a reason you can only be named a saint once you’re dead, a reason Superman exists only in comic books. Superheroes are expected to be superhuman—an impossible standard to hold a real person to. If anything, after considering these contradictions, I admire Yousafzai more than ever. Recognizing the validity of the critiques against her while still believing she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is the kind of duality that brings heroes down from their pedestals and sets them at eye level—something believable, something both attainable and inspirational.

​Maybe heroes aren’t meant to stay spotless on our screens, icons, and comics. Maybe their mistakes remind us that greatness was always human to begin with.