Updated to OS Catalina and lost all of the documents in the only folder that I had on my desktop

I updated to OS Catalina a couple weeks ago. I just now went to access a document in the folder that I keep on my desktop. The folder itself is visible, but when I open it, there are no documents inside and it is completely empty. I cannot find the missing documents anywhere. There is a new 'Relocated Items' folder on my desktop as well, but the files are not there either. When I open the 'relocated items' folder it brings me to a bunch of other folders that contain nothing that I recognize. Most of the items in these folders can't even be opened by any of the applications on my computer so an error message pops up. HELPP!!!