I appreciate the help, this is the farthest I've ever gotten in 2 years haha. Makes so much more sense why that happened then. That sucks.... a lot :/
"If you choose to link your Steam Account to another EA Account, just know that the second EA Account won't be able to be linked to a different Steam Account in the future either."
that's the weird part, that's exactly WHAT I did. I made a new Steam account and connected it to the first, older EA account and it worked. That still didn't have my data tho... Is my data just absolutely gone forever then? Just give up the hopium and make a new account from scratch?