Feeling lost and stuck at 26. How do you break this vortex?

Hi everyone, this is sort of a vent cause I'm feeling completely lost in my career as an Industrial Designer. I had this dream of becoming one since I was a kiddo. At first it was more architecture-related, but later on the idea of building and projecting things really grew on me. Now I'm 26. Graduated in ID at PoliTo in Italy, spent 4 years studying and writing my thesis (I got so passionate about it that it became a 400-page brick about Studio Ghibli engineering), started a master's in Systemic Design but dropped it cause it wasn't really my thing. Right now I'm living in Krakow, and I feel completely stuck. I feel like I'm in a perpetual vortex. Getting constantly rejected or ghosted by studios and corps is getting so tiring, and I feel like I cannot escape from it no matter what I try. I've actually worked in the field. I have about 6 years of experience in CAD designing, engineering for manufacturing, CMF, DFM, concepting and rendering. I worked and still work as a project assistant for an Italian/Korean designer, and some of the stuff I designed even got published in design journals like Living Corriere or Ansa. But looking for jobs is just so hard and energy draining that I decided to take a break a few months ago. Right now I'm working as a vendor in a small vegetable and cheese shop just to get by. The thing is, I didn't actually stop. I think about design every single minute of my days. I look at old classmates who graduated with me and are now working in UX/UI, and I feel like I'm really falling behind.Since graduation, I haven't found a single stable job. Everything I found fell through because the projects weren't self-sufficient or the connection to the client just passed out. On top of that, the few real projects that actually got finished are under NDA, so without my BSc projects my portfolio feels pretty much empty. I can't figure out if the problem is my portfolio, my background, or just the market. I know I'm still young, but not seeing a way out is getting really exhausting. Has anyone been in this kind of position? How do you deal with NDA projects when your portfolio is empty, and how do you break out of this loop? Thanks for reading if you made it this far.