Cannot connect to Media Encoder from After Effects - "Could not read from source"

I have all my adobe products on an external hard drive because they were taking up too much space on my MacBook. I've had no issues up until a couple days ago when I tried to export an After Effects comp with Media Encoder. Instead of adding to the queue, I recived a popup that said Media Encoder wasn't installed on my computer. I read that maybe they were outdated versions, so I updated to the 2022 versions for both of them. Didn't work, recieved the same message.

I put AME back on my laptop, and tried exporting again. This time, it opened AME like usual (which it wasn't doing before, so that's good) but nothing showed up in the queue. I added the project to the AE render queue and added it to AME from there, and that time it DID add the file to the Media Encoder queue like normal, but the file immediately fails when trying to render. Error says "Could not read from the source"

Premier has absolutely no trouble connecting to AME and can export like normal, before and after putting AME on my laptop by itself. It's JUST After Effects that is having this issue so I don't think it's an AME issue, and both programs have full disk access on in my privacy settings.