Just say yes.

[Smacks head in comically exaggerated manner] OH RIGHT! I haven’t done improv since Friday, Nov. 21. That was just a little over a week ago, but the realization hit me with the urgency of an actual face palm late yesterday afternoon while driving from my third cat feeding of the day to my fourth. Since Monday the 24th, I have been busy with practical matters that have required waking up early, driving around a lot, and primarily keeping the company of other people’s cats. I spent so much of the past week trying to figure out why I felt so… off. Tired, unmoored, unregulated, dull: name a frustrating feeling and there’s a very good chance I’ve felt it over the past ~170 hours. It’s a relief to have confirmation that the hobby I took up a little over a year and a half ago has achieved its desired effect. Improv adds value to my life and makes me better at being a human. Nice. This is what I was hoping for as I nervously hovered over “add to cart” on the UCB website for who even knows how long on a random February or March day in 2024, just a few weeks after my 40th birthday, debating whether or not to finally take the plunge into Improv 101 with Julie Brister. I’d done this dance for years, always coming away with more reasons for why not improv than reasons to simply say yes to this thing I found so compelling. But that day, for whatever reason, I found my yes.

It seems so obvious to me now as I write this, I'm fully improv-pilled. A week without doing any wreaks havoc on my central nervous system. COOL. But it's heightened by the fact that I no longer have a creative-leaning day job to give my constantly firing synapses the easy targets they’ve grown so accustomed to. Improv interrupts my otherwise ceaseless inner monologue. It’s training parts of my brain that have rarely been called upon to act, namely the parts that can recognize and play with patterns, tropes, and relationship dynamics on the spot and the parts that enable me to trust — this is where I struggle the most, in improv and all other aspects of my life(!). I’m not “good at it” yet, not even close, but the drive to one day perform a perfect Harold has also resulted in me spending a lot more time around spaces like WE Improv and WGIS, inevitably finding a loose knit community of like-minded oddballs (complimentary) in the process.

This time last year I was taking advantage of a UCB discount code to sign up for my 301 class. After wrapping 201 in late August of '24, I was on the fence about whether or not I'd continue. Also this time last year, I was feeling similarly exhausted because holiday weeks always mean a lot of extra work in the form of pet care. It’s a lot of running around, a lot of getting in for the night late, a lot of forgetting to eat enough one day and scrambling to course correct the next. You’d think that after all of these years I’d have better systems in place, but nah. In the past several years, there were less pets to contend with, but way more overtime work hours spent prepping Best Of materials for my full time job. Best Of was always it’s own source of stress, but it meant heavy thinking, moderate copy editing, and light coding. All things that to me = happy brain. But I also needed to get through last year's Best Of demands before I could really hone in and determine whether or not improv was for me. Turns out it was and still very much is, my 301 class in January 2025 flipped the switch in my brain and made me realize that I was going to be an Improv Person. Tbh, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about this reality from an intellectual standpoint, but clearly my body knows better than my brain. The simple reassurance of knowing I get to go to class again tomorrow afternoon has me feeling calm, relieved, and focused. Body > mind. [Iime for another exaggerated face palm].

Yesterday I was peak emo in the group chat (really saying something for me). Now I’m typing away like I’ve just solved solved the riddle of the sphinx. Once again, I appear to have found my yes. I highly recommend it.