I work in disability support. Some of the kids I am working with have gone over the last year from non speaking to using sign and are making real meaningful progress in their self care skills. They can keep going in the face of difficult times, so my problems don’t seem so hard.

Also, in Australia we have the NDIS, a system for funding disability supports in a socialised manner without restricting what options someone uses too much. While all governmental systems (or any systems with money) are susceptible to grift progress is being made on catching fraudsters and prosecuting them while also closing the loopholes they exploit. The NDIS will be around for a long time to come and will help Australians with disabilities determine their own futures and make them a reality. There are problems with it but honestly it has been a game changer and I think it is a model for the rest of the world to aspire to.

Yep, missing people who hurt you sucks. I have had that experience, it sucked a lot and took years to get through, but now I don’t miss them at all. Honestly losing them was a great thing for me in the long run and it was a good opportunity to learn who I was and what I could do. I left at 17, never finished high school, but went on to have a great relationship with my now spouse, we worked together to raise her younger brothers from 12 through to 18, we have a cat who is an asshole that I love dearly, and we have moved more than a thousand kms away from my toxic trash family. I am happy now, you can be happy, this is just a shitty, bumpy start and it will be confusing, but the emotional systems you have will recalibrate and you will not miss them the same way you do now. Honestly I just regret for them that they couldn’t see how silly they were being and how much they hurt myself and my siblings.

You may be having a disk seek issue. Are you on a spinning disk? If so, sometimes running something a couple of times will have some cached or at least have the heads in the right spot to read the needed data. If that is the issue upgrading to an SSD would probably solve the issue at the root. A possible test would be using a RAM disk if you can be bothered testing it, you have sufficient RAM that it may be viable depending on the game.

That all said, for next steps I would personally consider if maybe an older version of WINE would work. Could you try installing another older version of both the vanilla and GE versions? Also, did you update your nVidia drivers recently? Maybe roll back if your system will work with that, I can do it easily in EndeavourOS but Mint is not something I am recently acquainted with, it may be a real pain or may tank your driver install to try and roll back. Also testing installing a browser in WINE and loading a video that way may help troubleshoot, or VLC through WINE and native to compare. Ultimately you want to try and find the difference between the failed states and the working states, so if you come back bring a log from a working run and a failed run.