You can leave a town physically years before part of you stops measuring distance from it.

Leaving is not one event. You can move away, build a life elsewhere, and still find that your sense of scale, success, and normality is being measured against somewhere you no longer live. That measuring runs quietly and can go on for years, shaping choices without ever announcing itself.

Ask whose standards you are actually using when you judge how you are doing. If the answer is a place you left long ago, that is worth examining. You are allowed to change the reference point.