Good info here.  Lucius can you point me towards a tutorial on further explaining the risks and backup/storage techniques you mention?

I downloaded an updated version of electrum and poof it's now working again.  Thanks for the replies, ya'll really walked me off the ledge today.  Scary stuff.  I need a better method of storing crypto, this all seems so transitive.

Take it easy is right..  This go me all wound up.  When I click on electrum to open it, the color wheel just spins and spins.  
Is the seed phrase 12 words?  I just found what I think is the seed phrase but not sure as it has no mention of electrum when I wrote it down.
I followed you direction and found the file.  When you say back it up, do you mean onto an external hard drive?  Sorry for the basic questions, I'm not tech savvy at all.  

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Ok I confirmed it is in fact the seed phrase that I found.  So that's a relief.  Can you confirm I can recover my wallet with the seed phrase even if I can't get electrum to work on the computer that the wallet was sitting on?

Hello,

I'm a beginner with all this and I foolishly upgraded my MAC OS to Monterey without considering what might happen with my electrum wallet.  I now cannot open my wallet and am scared to do anything for fear I will lose it and its contents.  Can someone recommend the next step I should take to try and recover it.  Not sure where I wrote down my seed phrase but hopefully have it somewhere.  I'm hoping I don't need it at this point. 
Please help, I'm losing it!

allrollsin21