I'm the same in this as Joda. Never learnt any sheet music or anything. Got taught the basic chords and just ran with it. Only play music i like, and sing along to what i like.
It's also good to lower the difficulty on some segments yourself. For example take Heartbeats by Jose Gonzales. That's not an easy pick to do, however you can just change it to chords, then learn to tab the chords a bit, then steadily switch over to the real tab.
Same with Under the Bridge by RHCP. That's a fun one cuz it's not the easiest, but with a little practice you can really start making it sound like the original.
I did it with this song:
I couldn't play the real tab and sing at the same time, so i toned the music part down (a lot). It sounds really minimalistic but you can get away with a lot.
Also: switch between trying a hard song till you get tired of it, go back to playing easy fun stuff a bit and then return to the hard songs. You'll notice you can suddenly pull off chords you couldn't before.
Good luck!