why won’t my phone connect to the internet ?

Try a Forced Restart of the iPhone to see that will help reset things.

Force restart iPhone - Apple Support

If no luck, try connecting to the WiFi down at the coffee place. If the phone won't connect there, then it's pretty clearly a WiFi issue with the phone itself. Time to visit the Genius Bar or Apple Service shop.

If the phone will connect at the coffee shop, then the puzzle continues. Try changing the name of your WiFi network as test to see if the iPhone will connect that way.

serenityerb wrote:

oh my gosh thank you so much, that was exactly the problem

Add-on VPN clients are… quite possibly not doing what many people might expect, and can be doing things many people might not want… but if you want to provide the opportunity for your privacy breached, your traffic to be logged, and your activities re-sold, and quite possibly your traffic injected and modified, and this in exchange for negligible added security, by all means, load an add-on VPN client. Too many of the available VPNs are really shady, and various of those have been caught in lies when the providers leaked data.

Note: I am here differentiating commercial first-few-hops VPN add-on clients from the VPN clients necessary to access the internal network of an affiliated organization. I’m here referring to the former, and not to the private VPN clients and access.

If there’s an add-on VPN client app around, remove that app entirely, restart, and try again.