Your experience is basically *everybody's* experience when starting out on any complicated, technical and creative endeavour, so you're probably on the right track! 😉
It's more complicated in many ways starting today because everybody has access to *waaayyy* more tools - people are struggling selecting which of their twelve different compressors to use before they've even learnt how to hear compression, let alone how to *use* them both technically and artistically to achieve a particular affect.
It doesn't matter whether it's photography, drawing, playing an instrument, sculpture, whatever - the exact processes might be different, but the principles are all much the same - how to learn the vocabulary of the task you want to do, and how to develop the experience of which tools to use, and how to use them tastefully and with intent, to achieve the desired creative outcome.
For anyone learning *anything* creative, I always loved this bit from Ira Glass:
For something more specific, and without knowing exactly where you are in your learning process, I would strip it down to basics. Take your most recent song, save out a copy, and remove all plugins etc, reset all faders and pans. Mute all the extraneous stuff to only leave the core parts playing - let's say, the core drums, bass, chordal part and vocals.
Bring up a basic balance where the drums and bass are working together, bring up the vocal to where it sounds good, and bring up the chordal parts to fill out the sound, without overwhelming the vocal.
If you can't get something here that kinda works, then likely you have problems other than you mix - ie, your arrangement, your playing, the basic recordings etc may all have problems that make it hard to achieve a good mix. If so, you can look at those and see what can be done to improve them.
If you can achieve a rough balance at this point which sounds "ok", then you can try bit by bit bringing in the other, less vital parts and "colouring in" the mix. If you feel the vocal starts to lose focus or get stomped on by these other parts, then probably those parts aren't working, so consider leaving those out of the mix, or trying approaches which get them out of the way (I'm trying to not focus on specific techniques at this stage).
Once here, and you have a basic balance with most of the parts you want, try and assess whether there are any problems to take care of. Is the bass muddy and indistinct? Is the guitar too sharp or it sticks out in places? Does the vocal sound a little unpleasant at times, etc? There are a variety of ways to address these problems, and if you choose to do so, *be gentle about it*. Use the *least* amount of processing you can to *improve* the problem, rather than try to be heavy-handed and "fix" it (remember, you probably haven't developed your ears enough to make adequate judgements of how much to do something, so stay on the side of under-doing it for now).
Take your rough mixes, and listen to them out of the context of mixing - ie, put them on your phone/headphones/car etc, go for a walk/drive, and listen outside the concept of thinking "which EQ should I be using on the acoustic guitar part". You'll start to listen more artistically, rather than just listen for technical issues, and start to get some general rough ideas on what's working, what's not working, and possible ways in which you want to move the mix to something that "feels" better.
And lastly, the thing no one wants to hear when they are learning - the mix you do in ten years' time will be way better than what you are doing now (if you're doing it right, at least!). For now, do the best you can, listen, analyse, get feedback, try stuff, don't be afraid to strip the mix down and start again, and above all, however you get there, *finish it*. Even if you're less than happy with the results, finish it, and move on.
We learn by doing, and the more you do, the more you'll develop your own techniques, aesthetics and creative voice. But it does take time to do that, there aren't any shortcuts, and *everyone* goes through this in their own way and time.
Above all, enjoy it, try not to get overwhelmed, and be glad you're learning with the amazing tools we have now, rather than on a four-track cassette portastudio with extremely cheap and limited, hardware-only gear like some of us had to use. What you can do in your first year of making music is *millions* of times better than what I could do when starting out, to keep everything in perspective... 🙂