Linux Mint will not Start?

[tepid dirge]

Hi, ive been using mint for a couple months with no problems. For some unknown reason, today, my laptop gets to the mint logo screen and stalls for a long time.
after it finishes stalling, it goes to some kind of terminal screen (im not too experienced in linux) that says the following:

You are in emergency mode. after logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot.... press enter for matinence.

when i press enter i get into the root, and when i try to reboot using systemctl, the terminal just stalls like the mint screen did.

also, i am not in a location that i can reinstall mint from.

this is what i get if i press esc before it stalls on mint

also, the last thing i did before this started happening was i rebooted my pc while it was at 0 brightness.