Are you a pessimist, one who believes the worst will happen and tends to expect unfavorable outcomes?

Or, are you an optimist, one who normally expects life to yield favorable outcomes?

Without a doubt I’m an optimist. Always was and probably always will be.

If I see the proverbial half glass of water, I see it as half full, not half empty.

Here’s a good example of how that affects my everyday life.

A week ago while I was going for my early morning walk I tripped on a long weed that wrapped around my foot and forced me to land face first on the pavement.

It was a hard landing. I laid on the pavement for a while assessing all the places I hurt. My head was bleeding nonstop down my face and both hands and legs were cut.

It took a while before I could get up and even longer before I could stop the blood. When I looked in the mirror I saw the serious cut next to my eye.

My assessment of that experience? I was lucky. So lucky. Nothing was broken which in and of itself was a good thing for me because it proved my old bones were still strong.

I saw something positive in that painful experience.

Life might get me down but not for long.

But I firmly believe being an optimist doesn’t mean shutting down reality. An optimist can still deal with what is out there without putting on rose colored glasses.

Maybe there are really three categories, pessimist, optimist and realist. Many people are a blend of all three, depending on circumstances.

My daughter Andrea, on the other hand, refuses to be a realist. No matter what, she remains optimistic. She’ll find something positive in every situation.

She thinks any worrying is counterproductive and doesn’t solve anything. She seriously chastises me for worrying about how I will pay to rebuild my house.

She and her husband, along with my daughter Maria, did everything in their power to make the situation better for me.

In addition to their hard manual labor to help clear away debris from my fallen ceilings, they hired a superb general contractor to take care of rebuilding and a private adjuster to deal with the insurance companies.

Greg, my wonderful son-in-law, reached into a pile of rubble and pulled out a small wooden owl that said “Hope.”

They did everything in their power to give me hope.

For a while I was singing the song from Annie, “The Sun will come out Tomorrow.”

I stopped being optimistic when dealing with insurance companies out to fleece policy holders. Their favorite word for me and hundreds of hurting policy holders: Denied.

Need a new roof?

Denied. Patch it, they said.

Need insurance funds to rebuild your house.

Denied.

I think you get the picture.

So I worried, even though my daughter said I was putting my health in danger by all my excessive worrying.

She’s not entirely wrong.

When we are stressed our heart beats faster, our breathing changes and we sleep less.

But we can’t just turn a mental switch inside our head and say, “no more worrying.”

What we can do, I believe, is eliminate a bit of the excessive worrying.

I had a life lesson this week along that theme.

David had to have his first BCG treatment to fight his newly diagnosed bladder cancer.

Neither one of us was familiar with the BCG immunotherapy made from the same bacterium used to create the tuberculosis vaccine. We had no idea what to expect and didn’t get much info from the urologist so we went online to learn about it.

It was off-putting to read that in some cases the drug can also cause TB.

Without going into detail let’s just say it was also scary to learn the strict procedure after the therapy.

What mostly did me in was a conversation with the nurse who said some men can’t cope with the treatment.

With little information to counter our fears, we were both anxiety ridden.

I prayed so hard that David would have the strength to endure what was said to be a two-hour treatment.

All that worry, all that anxiety came from a lack of accurate information.

Worrywarts waste energy and David and I wasted a lot of energy worrying about what we thought would be horrendous cancer treatment.

It wasn’t.

In a half-hour he was on his way home with no pain and thought it was so much easier than we believed.

We were jubilant with relief.

On the way home we talked about how “worrywarts” fret and needlessly magnify fear. That’s exactly what we were doing.

For me, it was a good lesson about the uselessness of worrying about what may happen. So often it doesn’t but we wasted our time and energy worrying. I learned my lesson. I now simply refuse to continue being a worrywart.

It’s probably easier now for others to be around me because I stopped complaining about insurance companies and other woes.

Changing my thought process has been so freeing. My anxiety went way down. Now, I wake up each day feeling joy, not fear.

I’m back to singing “The Sun will come up Tomorrow.”

No matter what, the sun will come up tomorrow.

And I’ll thrive just fine.

Contact Pattie Mihalik at newsgirl@comcast.net