Thanks, will try over the next few days (have to be clear-headed).
Good idea!
In addition to Vull's suggested course of action - which looks good from here - you'll want to finish off by using chown to set your recovered files' ownership back to $newyou:$newyou ( e.g. 1001:1001), using -R to include subdirs.
I'd stick to numeric IDs until you're sure your username maps to 1001 or other chosen uid:gid, but make them both the same.
I would suggest during this exercise always using the long form of ls (to show uid:gid), and earlier when copying, do so as root with -p keeping ownership, permissions and timestamps (if file dates matter to you as they do to me).
Or use mv instead if confident you don't need the source files anymore, but with this sort of thing I'd be more careful, and remove excess copies later.
You don't need good luck if you have good backups <&^}=