Im not studying and Im not going to study mathematics officially (Im a bit "old"), Im an amateur. When started to follow my hobby more seriously sometimes I feel that Im not understanding anything just memorizing things.
But the brain is a giant mystery: one or two years after I started the "hobby", with long periods of time not seeing something about mathematics, I get back and I was VERY surprised that I understood everything very clear and not only as a kind of "memorization", i.e., I understood really where comes all the things, in a human way (why measure is measure, where it comes from our relationship with common experiences in life, etc...)
Another think I learned reading books of math is that a topic can be seen from many points of view, someones are more in harmony with your own vision or pre-understanding of the topic and many others not too much. By example: I read a lot of analysis books of first year of university, I understood (with less or more effort) but I was feeling everytime that I was just "memorizing" things and not understanding (what in the moment was true: I was not understanding, just trying to understand and memorizing), but oh surprise!, now after some time and reading books of other mathematical topics (probability, topology, etc...) and reading different books of analysis from different perspectives (Abbott book or Tao's book) I started to see clearly analysis.
The same happen to me with topology: I didnt understood it when started to see it from the classical approach of metric spaces. Only after reading a book about topology from the point of view of topology (not analysis) I started to understand very clear. In many other topics of mathematics happened the same: some approach is not as understandable as other.
And Im starting to think that mathematics are really easy, the key stones are powerful ideas but very clean and simple. The difficulty comes, to me, from understanding the language of mathematics and having some kind of examples (images) and contexts that help see the questions with clarity.
Another thing that happened to me is that I started to NEED to prove every theorem I see, or least I need to see some proof about it. I started to see proofs as something essential and, moreover, very funny.
I dont know if this answer will be interesting or useful to you, I hope it will be. And talking more in general: in any kind of learning (not only maths) there are time where all is more boring/complicated/frustrating, and times where everything is very interesting and funny.
P.S.: my recommendation for analysis is Understanding analysis from Abbot. For topology my recomendation is Topology without tears from Morris.