So I just got done ripping my hair out for the past hour because slim wasn't allowing me to log in with my main account. All others included newly created accounts worked, so I figured it had to be related to my directory

After checking every config file related to X's startup I couldn't find anything wrong. .xinitrc and .Xauthority were fine.

by chance I must have moved the cursor in .xinitrc, so it asked me to save. I got a permission denied.

Upon closer inspection my home directory's owner and group permissions were set to root. I don't know how it happened, but I probably accidently ran something in a root window that screwed up.

Morale of the story, use SU.

What does stat or the logs say?

"probably" is ...

which logs are you referring to?

oddly enough I was unable to find anything odd in xorg.0.log or slim.log

And the lesson, repeated many times in many places: NEVER do ANYTHING with "root" permission (or logged in as "root") unles there's NO other way to accomplish the task.

And, if you really need "root" permissions, use sudo before you log in as "root."

If you were logged in as root at that time (or had a root shell open) you should be able to see what you have done in the history file of the root account.

possibly, but I've been logged in for days and I have been performing quite a lot of operations. Honestly I not sure what I did would really stand out in the logs anyway. One way or another I just need to be more careful not to run graphical operations as root.
It took me a long time to get used to sudo. Now I'm trying to get used to not having it now that I have been using gentoo. I guess I could install it.

You'll get little sympathy here if you screw up your system while you're running as root. There's simply no compelling reason to do that. The pitfalls are well documented, and the whole rationale of having a multi-user system is that you simply don't do that.