Time machine is backing up non-stop but no backup is created

I've been trying to create a single backup in my Time Machine but as soon as the backup is done, it just starts a new backup immediately and the backup it just finished is not recorded (it says latest backup: None) and nothing shows up on my hard drive where the back up is supposed to be. This nothing seems to be taking up space on the hard drive though because my available space has dropped.

Then a new backup starts immediately and it does the exact same thing- takes up space on my hard drive but nothing seems to be actually saved there.

If I try to turn off automatic backups, it just stops the backup I'm doing completely. Now why would I need automatic backups to run one after the other until the whole disk is full? Not much has changed on my computer in the last 5 minutes. But that's another question.

My question is, how can I create one simple backup on my hard drive and just stop there? This is driving me crazy and wasted a bunch of my time.

I'm running Monterey v12.2.1 on a Macbook Air 2020 M1