sims 4 household won't load

I have been having the problem where I tried to load my games, and then it started to load and ever time I did that, it took me straight back to the neighborhoods. other people have solved this problem and I tried to do the steps to make it work again, but I messed it up even worse because I didn't understand the directions, and now ALL of my saved games are gone, and half of the things in my save file has also disappeared. do I have to restart? I really really don't want to restart all of the progress I have. it makes me just want to quit playing the game forever.