@fairytalelife, I really feel for you and I do hope, every so dearly, that you do manage to work out what your password is. However I feel, for the benefit of the community, that I need to explain something about cryptocurrency.

It's really important in the land of cryptocurrency that passwords remain completely secret. Cryptocurrency passwords are not like regular passwords. Regular passwords just keep you locked out of some service, but cryptocurrency passwords, as you know, can be used to transfer funds.

Anyone who has a cryptocurrency password could spend your funds and although a system administrator could, in principle, keep a copy of it this is not a good idea from the system administrator's point of view. If the site was hacked the hacker could spend everyone's funds. This would destroy the Steem community in one fell swoop.

You wrote that: "There must be a way to unlock my account through human intervention. Nothing is impossible—inconvenient, maybe—but not impossible".

I can understand where you are coming from but in the land of cryptocurrency this isn't the case. In fact, if this were true then cryptocurrency wouldn't even work as a concept. If it were possible to brute force the password then people would try to steal large sums of money and it would be worth the effort.

Actually, technically you can brute force a password but the idea is that it would take longer than the age of the universe to complete, thus rendering it "effectively impossible".

Once again, I must say I truly, truly feel for your plight. In the early days of Bitcoin one individual lost their "password" (aka private key) and literally lost millions of dollars.

I do believe that the cryptocurrency community needs to look into a solution to this problem but
currently that solution has not been found.

I saw some very helpful suggestions from the other people who replied to this post of yours and I think some of them may well work. If they don't then perhaps, we as a community can make sure that we just up-vote @fairytalelife's posts until she recovers the $23K she has lost.

Good luck!