I'm also older than you (unless you're in your very late 40's :-)), but I relish learning new things.  What I usually don't do well is to learn things I have little or no interest in.

Perl was like that for me at first, actually.  I knew I should learn it, as I'd heard a lot about it (and even had to occasionally hack a huge Perl script a colleague had written, without really knowing a lot of the syntax), and was well aware that it was a useful skill to possess.

One weekend, shortly before the turn of the century, after installing Linux for the first time, I decided to sit down and "learn Perl".  I didn't expect to be fluent right away, but thought a weekend should be enough to make a good start, and be able to write a few simple programs.  It didn't happen, though -- there was just too much new material, and with no clear idea of where to start, it was a doomed undertaking.

However, once I did start learning Perl, and had a real need to be using it all the time, the learning process became a lot more fun, and the apparent effort was greatly diminished.

Nowadays, I stick to the things that interest me, and Perl is almost always the tool of choice.  As long as it's something that captures my interest, I'm quite happy to put in the effort to learn it, no matter how difficult it might be.  The flip side of that is, of course, that no matter how easy something is to learn, if it's not particularly fascinating to me personally, I'm quite likely to give up.

I don't know if any of this helps you, but I hope you can find your own pace without feeling discouraged.  Sometimes taking code fragments and rewriting them yourself can give you good clues and insights into their functionality.

And of course, you can always ask your fellow Perlmonks to give you help understanding specific problems; there are a lot of skilled teachers here, with great quantities of patience!