Game wont start. taskbar flickers with white border. cursor also flickers.

my specs are

amd fx 8120

8gb ram

hd radeon 7850

700watt psu

1tb hard drive

windows 8.1

was playing bf4 one day. game started becoming laggy so i switched from the mantle api back to directx. i played out that round so that i would recieve the double exp. i proceeded to quit and join a different server in hopes that switching back to directx would solve my lag issue. As i joined this new server the game didnt load. i would usually click on the bf4 icon on my taskbar once i see "loading game" on battlelog. once i did this time there was a black screen with my taskbar still showing. my cursor was in the middle and was flickering. my taskbar was also flickering. i tried alt - tabbing and i was able to get back on battlelog and my other tabs i couldnt click on anything on my taskbar. it seems to have crashed my taskbar. i tried waiting and seeing if that would help. so i alt tabbed back to bf4 and just waited for the game. after about 10 mins i alt tabbed back to see if battlelog says "now playing bf4". sure enough that was what it said but my bf4 was still a black screen and my task bar and cursor was still flickering. game never loaded. ive tried joining a couple of different servers and had the same results. i tried repairing the game on origin and then trying to join a server. same problem. i also tried uninstalling the game and reinstalling it. same problem. there are no error messages and the program itself doesnt crash or say not responding on my task manager. only way i was able to close bf4 was by pressing ctrl alt del and clicking task manager. even then the task manager that popped up was also flickering. after i ended bf4 process all the flickering stopped and i was able to use my taskbar again. please help.