Desktop folder missing from Sidebar and document names are grayed out on MacBook Pro

Thank you for the excellent explanations. They don't work for me but probably will help others. My issue seems to be not in what can be viewed but in the location of my desktop. It apparently is only in iCloud. Previous experience showed that when I moved the desktop OUT of iCloud, iCloud stripped the custom colors of my folders and "spilled" miscellaneous documents that once were in folders onto the desktop (last time, 90+ documents). iCloud is a pretty primitive tool in this regard.

So my question is: How do I get my desktop onto, well, my REAL desktop residing on my MacBook Pro hard drive. I want it to synch with iCloud only, say, once a day. TIA.

Thanks for the reply. Always appreciated. Unfortunately, "Add your Desktop and Documents files to iCloud Drive" is the opposite problem. Your info moves things to the iCloud. I need for my desktop to be out of the iCloud. Last week, when we brought my desktop from iCloud to my machine, it "spilled" 90 documents out of their folders (some were filed six layers deep) and it also stripped the colors of my custom-colored folders. (I believe this may be a known problem. The Apple advisor was pretty shocked at the result when he had me do it. Be warned!)

I restored my entire HD (420+ GB) from my backup drive to get back to normal. It took two days--the loss of time is was costly.) I thought this had fixed the problem, thus my query about finding the desktop in the Sidebar.

Now, for a reason unknown to me, everything seems to be back in the cloud! I need to fix this -- without iCloud's "pushing" my data from the cloud onto my desktop, which is what makes the mess.

The archive folder, btw, is empty.

I do not use a downloads or a documents folder.

Thanks a million. I think I found the problem, explained deep in the two magazine articles to which you generously gave me links.

"...it's a little weird that mac OS automatically removes the files from your desktop and documents folder and puts them in iCloud Drive. Most users would think that after disabling iCloud Drive syncing their files would actually get removed from iCloud Drive and moved to their desktop and documents folder to be stored locally, but it's actually the other way around . . . for some odd reason." ~ Craig Lloyd, how to geek

Glen Fleishman wrote in Macworld back in 2019, "The transition between [using iCloud] and disabling it remains confusing to users years later." He refers to the fact that once you unclick the desktop and documents folder option (via System Preferences), your data remains -- but in iCloud Drive.

If anyone knows how to turn off iCloud drive while at the same time keeping desktop and documents on my own blessed MacBook Pro, I'd be grateful for the info.