Illustrator CS6 Mac keeps crashing and preferences keep resetting - it opens completely blank

First off, I'm working with:

Illustrator CS6

Macbook Pro Retina OS X El Capitan

This is long but I'm really trying to be thorough.. And I'm desperate for help.

My problems started when illustrator suddenly crashed on me this afternoon after working on it all day. I didn't think much of it and reopened it, everything was saved so it was all good. About a minute later it crashed again. I tried reopening it again, this time only opening one page (since I had been working on 5) in case it was an overload or something like that (though that's never been a problem for me before). And about another minute later it crashed a third time. This has neeever happened to me before in the 6 years I've been using Illustrator. I finally sent a report even though I feel like those won't do anything. Once I sent it I immediately get this pop up saying something along the lines of "adobe has found a solution to your problem. Click here to see..." and so forth. I tried clicking the link and it doesn't work.

This is when I started searching around online for solutions. I saw all this stuff about deleting preferences (the en_US file) and resetting them because they could be corrupt and when you start a new illustrator file they'll go back to their default. So I tried finding this "en_US" file and was following all the instructions and I couldn't find it. I was getting really frustrated and started just randomly clicking on files and eventually I just went to the Adobe Illustrator file on the applications page, went to presets (not preferences..) and saw the en_US file and was so relieved I just deleted it. It asked for my password to delete it which made me a little nervous but I did it anyways because I just wanted it fixed. I also had seen that you should empty your trash afterwards so I did that too (sigh)... I tried reopening Illustrator and now everything is messed up. Everything is gone. No toolbar, no windows, just the two bars that go across the top and the grey working space area (I don't know the official names for these things), all of which are shrunken into the top left corner.

So now I go on a search for this problem and how to get everything back to normal. I just start manually putting all the windows back and resetting my keyboard shortcuts and when I finally got back to work it crashed again. I reopened it and everything was gone again along with keyboard shortcuts. I read something about needing to save the file in order for the preferences to save so I set everything back up again, saved it, started working, and it crashed again within a minute (of working). Opened it again, everything is gone again, and I have ripped out all of my hair by this point.

So I feel like I really screwed up with deleting the en_US file under Presets instead of Preferences. I can't find anything related to this aaanywhere. Whenever I search for something about presets, it either talks about the whole deleting preferences thing, or about the print, PDF, etc. presets. I honestly wouldn't care about having to reset everything when I opened it, since I have illustrator open all the time, if it just wouldn't keep crashing.. which was the reason I even did any of this!! I've never asked a question on any of these forums before but I have no idea what else to do, I've never not been able to find a solution somewhere online, where I feel like at least one person has had the same problem before.

Here are my main concerns & also a few more details:

1. Illustrator keeps crashing

     - it only crashes once I get a minute or two into actually working. I can have a file open and it will be fine if nothing's happening. Even when I was messing around with opening windows and setting up shortcuts with a file open in the background it was fine right until I went back to the actual board and I don't feel like it's a coincidence.

     -I got a new laptop not too long ago and had to reactive (or something like that, not reinstall though) all my adobe products and everything seemed to be working fine, but a few days ago I got a pop up saying that my free trail was almost over which I have no memory of ever starting since I own these products. I entered the serial number and everything was working again. I don't know if this is connected, but just throwing it out there.

     - At this point I have found the Preference folder and the actual "en_Us" file but have not deleted it yet because I'm scared of making things even worse. Should I delete it? The crashing problem is still there so obviously something's still wrong and that could be it.

2. Illustrator preferences disappearing

     - How badly did I screw up by deleting the presets? Is there anyway to get it back with the trash already emptied? Can I make a new one? Is it even important?

     - I've been considering uninstalling and reinstalling Illustrator but I feel like that's just going to drive me deeper into this hell hole if I can't install it again for whatever reason. Thoughts on this?

     - How do I get my preferences to stick? I can't find anything really promising in the Preference window from the Illustrator drop menu. In the Window menu there's the workspace tab which has "Reset current workspace" "New workspace" and "Manage workspaces", none of which seem to do anything but they seem relevant. I also saw something about permissions, but it says I have custom access and it's set to "read & write" and I changed all of them to read & write just in case but it didn't seem to affect anything.

     - I previously saved all my keyboard shortcut preferences that I just realized haven't been deleted which is the only semi progress I've made. Is there something like this but with the tool bar and windows?

This was way longer than I intended, so anyone who stuck with me and has any ideas I'd be so grateful because I'm so stressed and desperate