SOLVED: Contacted my host and they were able to tell me what I did wrong….eventually. Turns out I was accessing my site through user account that i had setup in my cPanel. Using the default username provided me access to the entire site, not just one folder/directory. After browsing through the material in the real user account, it turns out the wp-content folder was names wp-content-????, so i just renamed the folder back to wp-content and re-uploaded my theme in the proper place and it all works. almost lol. hope this helps someone!
Cheers
