Pessimistic?

Hmm...

I've always seen myself as being realistic. Of course, seeing isn't enough. I'm also actually being realistic. No, my "realistic-ness" isn't cold logic and cold blood. It's more like the absence of optimism and pessimism.

But whenever someone asks me if I'm pessimistic, half of my feeling seems to agree! Why?

This was what I was thinking about a while ago. Why do I seem to agree to an extent that I'm pessimistic? I thought (and felt) for a while, and I found the answer.

You know, there are 2 kinds of pessimism, in my opinion. One real, one fake.

What do I mean? The real one is the reasonless tendency to think and feel towards the direction of negativity. You try to predict the outcome of an event, and you do so in a negative light. This is really... well, pessimistic.
The so-called fake one is the reasonable, volitional, and conscious act of thinking and feeling more negatively about something. In this case, you know what you're doing. With the real pessimism you most probably don't know why you're so.

I have the fake one.
In my life, disappointment is something I can feel quite deeply if it occurs. To avoid that from happening, I would tend not to get my hopes up so as to evade the feeling of disappointment. This makes me look as though I'm pessimistic, but I'm not really. Because sometimes things do go wrong at the worst possible time, I tend to think a bit negatively first so that I'm somewhat prepared to face what's about to come, if it's something bad.

I'm afraid of failure, in a sense. Everybody does. It's just a matter of how well you can cope with it. As for me, I'd tend to "cope" with it even before it happens! After all, the higher you jump, the more painful you fall.