Question on vacation

Hey everyone so I started working at ups January 29 2024, they gave me a vacation request form back in October so 3 months ago I requested time off for January 20-26 of this month so next week… anyways manager comes up to me and tells me I actually don’t have vacation time but since I’m a hard worker he will give me the time off, just not paid. I’m confused on what to do. If I was never supposed to have time off, why did they give me the request form and why did they wait 3 days before my vacation? This ruined my mood. Any steps of how I can approach this? Please help