My boat has capsized and I am a new captain

Hello everyone, please excuse the long post.. I recently started sailing again, having been away from it since I destroyed a few computers in the early 2000s with Limewire. That being said, I am trying my best to do things in a moderately safe way this time.

I have a subscription to NordVPN and have routed my qBittorent through the VPN through the advanced settings in qBittorent's network interface option, using the terminal to identify the right interface on my 2021 M1 iMac running Sequoia 15.6.1. (This took some time to understand, and I still don't fully know what I did)

I had success and was able to torrent a few pieces of media. However, I have now run into the issue that I see an orange flame stating connection problems on qBittorent. I have gone through everything I did before to reset it, I have updated everything, refreshed and restarted everything and I still cannot get qBit to connect.

Any ideas for fixes I could try next?

TL: DR Mac running Sequoia + NordVPN + qBittorrent = Orange connection flame in qBit