Where do I go from here?

TLDR, I’ve been studying Japanese for a few years. I took two years of it in high school and two semesters of it in college, but recently took a break and I now want to jump back in.

I did pretty well in high school, though it moved pretty slow so it wasn’t that hard. Got my hiragana and katakana down, as well as some very basic vocab and grammar. The college course was focused around “learning through performing”, which consisted more of memorizing and reciting scripts and less of actually breaking down and understanding the language, which really didn’t work for me. Between not having a clue what I was doing and the humiliation of messing up scripts in front of the class, was all I could do to keep up with the course, and I feel like my Japanese actually got worse throughout the year. It was demoralizing to the point that I had to take a break from the language.

So now I’m trying to figure out what to do. I want to get to the point that I listen to or read media, but I just don’t know where to start. I downloaded the wanikani Anki deck, I tried going through my old textbook, and I’m trying to be patient but I don’t think any of it is helping. Is there a more effective way I can go about this?