Grammar PSA: This (below) is a wringer. Before electric clothes dryers, you'd wash your clothes, then put them through this to remove excess water before hanging them to dry. As you can imagine, your clothes look awful and wrinkled after squeezing them like that, which is why everything needed to be ironed back in the day.

So if you've had a really hard time and you feel worn out and flattened, you've been "put through the wringer," not "put through the ringer."

Bonus: I did not know that you could buy modern wringers these days, but this is one of them. They're readily available on Amazon. Apparently they're intended for travel (presumably long camping trips?), or hard-core do-it-yourselfers, or people who want to be off the grid (how those people buy a wringer on Amazon is an exercise for the reader).
@bmac I knew an artist who made various types of paper who used one to squeeze out excess sizing in fresh sheets & get uniform thickness.
@bmac the last time that I read about this, someone mentioned in the comments that they once used a manual wringer and it apparently really hurts when your fingers get munched by one

@bmac add to the list of mutated idioms:

champing (not chomping) at the bit

@fuzzykb I may have given up on that one, but I'm still holding out hope for "take the reins" (not reigns).
@bmac @fuzzykb I really feel like we need to flush this one out, it's not complete yet.
@bmac @fuzzykb “Free reign” causes me similar pain.