#breaking my no-influencing-the-results rule to say: op you are not even remotely the asshole and i will fight anyone who says you are

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

I grew up in the Mormon church, in a very conservative and religious home, in a neighborhood and city that were both ~99% Mormon. At 16, I stopped believing, and I told my mother. She refused to let me stop going to church, and insisted that I try believing it again. So I stopped talking about it and went back to pretending to believe. Pretty much everyone I'd ever met was Mormon, and I was afraid that if any of them found out I was an atheist, they'd rat me out to the church leadership, and word would get back to my parents. I never tried to talk to my family (or any other Mormon) about it again while I was living at home. I was scared, but I don't know what I was scared of.

Two years later, I left home for college. (I made up a lie about a non-deferable scholarship to explain why I was going to college before a Mormon mission.) Once I was out of the house, I told my parents again that I didn't believe. They didn't argue. I even moved back in with them for the summer of my freshman year. We had a few arguments about politics before we all learned to avoid those topics, but religion never came up.

A couple years after that, I started having occasional nightmares and flashbacks involving the first time I told my mother I wanted to leave the church. (I still have those.) I'd always been bad at writing to family, and this just made it harder. I wrote home less often and took longer to answer messages.

It's been eight years since I left home. I've moved to a different continent, and I haven't spoken to any of my relatives in over a year. I never talked to any of them about why. I never told them that I'm bisexual, that I'm trans, or that I've changed my name and gone on HRT. I feel like nothing I have to say about any of that would mean anything to them (except that I'm being led astray by Satan, which they already believe), so it isn't worth the effort. Especially since I don't really care about any of them that much.

I've gotten a couple of messages from relatives since I stopped answering. (None from my parents.) For the most part they seem to be following my cue.

I'm never sure if going no contact like this was unreasonable. Should I have explained what was going on? Sometimes I wonder if the fact that I've been happier since cutting them off is enough justification, or if it just makes me a bad person. Did I just make everything harder than it needed to be by keeping it all a secret for two years, then blame my parents for it when I moved out?

Am I the asshole?

What are these acronyms?