I needed a fix.

When life feels a little stale, you often hear the advice to revisit what you loved as a kid. I loved reading, animals, writing, horror movies, playing dress up in my mom’s old clothes from the 1960s and ’70s, and performing.

Most of those still ring true, minus the horror movies and my mom’s clothes. What I still love, but haven’t done in so long, is perform. There are days when I wish I’d finished my theater degree instead of switching to another major, and moved to New York City, and there are lots of other days I’m grateful to have a steady job and not be in the Big Apple.

So recently, I channeled that wee Broadway baby, who wanted nothing more than to see her name in lights on the Great White Way, and signed up for improv classes.

I’ve always been ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.

Though I’ve acted in shows here and there throughout my life, I’ve never gotten on stage and created something out of nothing the way improv asks of you. But for the last four months, once a week for a couple of hours, I’ve played on stage with an array of humans of all ages. It’s like a play date for adults.

Do you know how little most of us play? Once you enter the throes of adulthood, playtime is the first thing to hit the skids. And it’s one of the most healing and nourishing things we can do.

During classes, we play improv games that spur us to create weird scenes and characters, try out different accents and relationships, and pray we don’t get stymied into silence on stage, wondering what to say or do next. Or maybe that’s just me.

For example: Yes, ’tis I, Beatrice, your long-lost cousin showing up at our family reunion at a Renaissance festival where we’ll watch our cousin Fred joust while we talk about your recent divorce.

Or, I just gave birth to a huge baby thanks to these Big Baby Pills from the doctor, and why don’t you love him? Is it because he doesn’t look like you, like your mother accused me of in the hospital?

It’s an endless stage version of Choose Your Own Adventure, dependent on audience suggestions and whatever pops up in your and your scene partners’ brains. The antics are like what you’d see on the improv comedy TV show, “Whose Line is it Anyway?”

What I’ve realized over the last few months, however, is that even the most lighthearted play can lead to self-reflection and epiphanies.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• It’s good to humble your ego here and there: I’m no Meryl Streep, but I’d snag a fun role now and again. And because I could act, I assumed I’d be a shoo-in at improv. But I’ve come to realize that acting and improv differ greatly. As an actor, someone else has done the work for you of establishing a character, setting, plot and dialogue. In improv, you have 0/4 of those pre-existing conditions. It’s all on you, baby. And sometimes I have failed. I stuttered, used more than my lifetime’s share of filler words, and went blank.

• Fail. Fail a lot: It doesn’t feel good in the moment, but it’s good for future you. You don’t learn if you don’t fail. It’s also good to reflect on how you deal with failure and adjust as needed. Do you mope around and belittle yourself to friends as I do for about a day before the emotional injury begins to heal? Or do you pick yourself up, dust off the flecks of humiliation and crawl back on stage, ready to do better with what you’ve learned?

• On that note, it’s good to challenge yourself: I put off signing up for classes for months. I was still nervous about being terrible, despite the previous shoo-in comment, and about the showcase performance that caps off seven weeks of classes. I gave myself permission to skip out on the show if I felt like it. But I didn’t. I did two showcases in front of an audience that included my family and survived.

• Trust in others: A stalwart rule of improv. I noticed myself overdoing it in sketches. Taking on the bulk of the work and trying to oversteer the action because I got nervous the other person wouldn’t help steer the ship, and we’d sink. This also felt like a real-life lesson: Don’t always take on all the responsibility. Trust that others can and will succeed. Allow and accept help. Stop shouldering the entire burden.

• “Yes, and”: It’s probably the No. 1 rule in improv — always accept the reality your fellow improv playmates present to you on stage, even if it’s something ridiculous, like cats turning into tacos due to a witch’s curse, and go with it. It was surprisingly challenging, as sometimes I didn’t want to go where the person on stage was taking us. I had my own idea of which direction to go. I learned to say “yes, and,” though many times I forgot and pushed ahead on my own, which led me to self-flagellate almost immediately after leaving the stage. Breaking the universal law of improv felt like the worst treason.

• Which brings me to this — forgive yourself: After the second showcase, I spent a fair amount of time beating myself up for both real and likely imagined mistakes. Yes, I definitely forgot to “yes, and” during one sketch, and I felt pretty bad about it. However, that failure will hopefully serve as a teaching lesson. And also, to stop being so critical of myself. This is supposed to be fun and good for me for even trying in the first place. This goes for you, too, and life in general.

• And finally, learning something new is hard: Improv is challenging, more so than I anticipated it would be. It reminded me why so many of us are reluctant to try new things, because it’s hard to be bad. I’ll never forget what my yoga teacher told us during yoga teacher training so many years ago: You’ve got to show up and suck before you can show up and shine. And that, my friends, is excellent advice. Too many of us show up and expect perfection of ourselves, myself included. Why do we enact this impossible expectation? Maybe because we hate failure and having others watch us fail. But failure is a gift from the divine, and we must give ourselves grace on our learning journeys, which is really all of life.