Serendipitous this came up.
Turns out I am expected to spend the week of Xmas this year with someone I was infatuated with about eight years ago - and I mean the type of crush where you think about the person 24/7, even dreaming about them. In the interim years since I caught feelings I have learned that this person is awful, a liar and a covert narcissist/misogynist as well as a control freak (including psycho freakouts, eating disorders, etc.). He abused the hospitality of my family a few times in the past without apology or amends, and since has done nothing to ameliorate his failings. He has also tried to abuse me verbally a couple of times, unprovoked.
Fortunately for me, I never had a relationship with them, and to my great relief they more or less left my immediate circle and my life all those years ago. I thought that was it, done and dusted, thank you next.
Or, so I thought. Thanks to COVID scuppering their plans to waltz off to Greece or the Maldives or Dubai for the holidays like they usually do, this person is possibly infiltrating my family circle again (on a thoughtless but innocuous invitation from my mother, who knows no better and had no clue about my feelings). Now, don't get wrong; I have no illusions about Xmas being a happy occasion for most, and being a gay, non-Christian black sheep who lives in a cold climate of course I fucking hate it anyway. Still, in this year of shit start-to-finish, I was hoping for an easygoing non-stressful peaceful December with a few loved ones.
Then this bombshell. I want to be 100% unaffected, and while I feel and hope that my heart is cold and my soul turned against this individual, I cannot trust that my body and hormones agree. I also cannot trust this person's behaviour, and my warnings about him over the years have fallen on deaf ears. I have no other family and no friends to call on but the ones with whom I live and spend holidays, so short of booking AirB&B alone for myself on Xmas week (which my grandmother & mother would crucify me for) I have nowhere I can go and nothing I can do to escape this. This antagonist of mine is the one who has money, a well-paying job, and a busy social circle, so I don't even see why it has to me that suffers immense discomfort and painful reminiscence or having to leave my own family.
This is making me so tense and angry and upset, and there's no solution. I want to shake my mother and get her to wake up to this person's insanity, but with no proof and with her rose-coloured glasses grafted firmly onto her face I can't do shit.
Why can't self-obsessed extrovert users just go and party all together in a warehouse somewhere during holidays, and leave the rest of us decent folks alone?