Illustrator is only opening an old version of my project. Where did my recent edits go?

I tabbed over to Illustrator to do something else and then all of a sudden my project was gone, illustrator was open but it was just black with no file open.
When I went to "File" > Open recent projects, it was there, but when I went to open it there was only a pop up saying it couldn't be found, or something like that.

So I went to the file folder where it was saved and found the file, but it opened it up to where it was over a month ago.
Did I really just lose over a month of work? I thought auto save was on? It's never NOT auto saved for me before, so I didn't stress about manually saving from time to time.

I can't figure out how to verify if auto save is on and google isn't helping me, but more importantly, where did all of my work go and is it possible to recover it??