You mention that you’ve come to the point where you “no longer know how to go forward”. This statement should preferably be re-defined in terms of what point your character(s)character(s) have come to: At least one of them has most likely been facing some kind of problem, the severity of which is not really relevant. It is, perhaps, a commonplace experience for Western World citizens to have some sort of epiphany about how shamefully trivial their own predicaments are, compared to the life-threatening perils elsewhere in the world that they read about in the news, but a novel is not journalism. And that’s partly the magic of literature: how it can turn the trivial to thrilling. It may be a magic of disputable value, but it’s remarkable nonetheless.
Whether or not your protagonist is also your hero is up to you. A hero is defined as having certain unchanging traits that somehow drive the story forward and, ultimately, contribute to the resolution of the protagonist’s troubles. Marvel’s superheroes, with their superpowers, is probably as close to a stereotypical example as one can conceivably come. In short, at the end of your story, the protagonist emerges as a “changed man”. The hero does not. What makes it even more interesting, though, is that these terms don’t actually refer to characters. They are mere functions, that can be either embedded into the same character (who, in that case, will emerge, both changed and unchanged, depending on how you look at it), or allocated to different ones, as is the case, for example, in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, where McMurphy is more of a hero, whereas chief Bromden is the actual protagonist.