Time & Perspective Quote by Margaret Mahy

Ordinary life “asserting itself” is a sly way to describe reality as an intruder: mundane obligations barging back in after imagination has staged its coup. Margaret Mahy, a children’s and YA author who never talked down to young readers, nails the afterimage of deep absorption - the moment when a book, a game, a friendship, a summer, or a private fantasy world feels more authoritative than the calendar.

The sentence works because it refuses the tidy language of escapism. She doesn’t say she “got lost” or “forgot herself.” She says she lived “in some other lifetime,” then sharpens it into something slightly unsettling: “taken over someone else’s life.” That shift matters. It suggests not just comfort but possession, a temporary identity theft that leaves you disoriented when you return to your own routines. Mahy captures how narrative and play can be both liberation and displacement: you come back richer, but also mildly estranged from the person who left.

There’s also a quiet comment here on childhood and adolescence as practice runs for becoming someone else. Young people try on selves the way adults try on ideologies or careers, and Mahy treats that shape-shifting as serious psychic labor. The subtext: the boundary between “ordinary life” and imagined life isn’t fixed; it’s negotiated, and the negotiation has consequences. When reality resumes, it can feel less like homecoming than like waking up into a role you didn’t audition for.