New to unity/animation, have small brain.

Hello, im relatively new to unity and found myself stuck while learning animations. i started a little project to modify a model in a game so it could use their animations system to let me use external tools to control the position of most of the bones of the character while in game (for poses/screenshots and such) relatively small project as theirs already open source tools for this. my only issue is setting up the animations themselves. i have 0 experience animating in unity and this is my first attempt at doing so. all tutorials i see online have buttons that are/arent there on my unity and ive been stumped for about a week on this and reset the project 4 times now due to having too many errors.
im starting with the eyes/blinking since thats only 1d
been a week and ive made 0 progress.
this is what its asking me to do.

In the Layers tab in your FX Object, add animation layers corresponding to all the eye controls you want to add. For example, add the following layers:

• Left Eye Movement
  
  
• Right Eye Movement
  
  
• Left Eye Blink
  
  
• Right Eye Blink
  
  
• Pupil Dilation
  
  
• Eyes Widen
  

You can also control both eyes together, which this guide will do for blinking.

Set the layers' weight to 1

this ive done, its simple enough.
but then this i got stuck on for a few reasons.

This guide will setup blinking on both eyes by controlling it with just the left one. You can instead repeat the below commands for just left/right eyes to do independent blinking, or use it as the basis of dynamically linking/unlinking the eyes using a gesture or control.

1. Create two new animations: anim_blink and anim_unblink. These animations should control the blendshape(s) or the bones to fully blink/unblink your avatar's eyes
   
   
2. Create a new Blend Tree as the default state in the blinking layer. It should be the only state and Entry should automatically transition to it
   
   
3. Double click the blend tree to open it and make it a "1D" Blend Type. Set the Parameter to "LeftEyeLid"
   
   
4. Add two motions: anim_blink and anim_unblink. The former should have a threshold closer to 0 and the latter to 1
   
   
5. You can keep the threshold values at 0 and 1, or you can experiment to find out what works best for your eyes. These values control at what point the animations begin to blend into one another, and you'll likely want some deadzone so your eyes aren't fluttering. I set it mine to 0.4 and 0.9.
   
   the parameters ive set up already on the fx object so thats all good,
   this is as far as ive gotten. i believe i messed up somewhere while setting up step one.
   when creating the animation, it put it on the base layer. i do not want this i assume, but cannot delete/move from base layer without the animations being deleted from the entire project.
   also the anim_blink is linked so i cannot unlink it, and i do not know how to.
   

just deleting the link doesnt do anything and as long as this is linked the models eyes will stay permanently shut reguardless of what else i try to do.
meaning, i have no idea if any of the other steps im doing are working or not because this is like this.
if youd like me to post the rest of the steps im sure ill mess up the rest of those too.
thank you in advance for the help, just let me know if more info/screenshots are needed.