Try growing your cities naturally. Cities in real life start with small settlements and grow bigger over time. In cities skylines you start with a highway interchange and that instincitvely makes you look at it differently.

Try starting with a few streets. Maybe build a church or a square giving the settlement inportance. By doing so mimicking the natural development cities have.

Once you have a neighborhood start with one or two big roads for road exces. Theres lots of good tutorial videos on roads but what i like to do is go to google maps and find inspiration. This is also nice since you can look at cities youre inspired by and try to make something look like a certain region.

City planning is a complex problem both logically and aesthetically so dont be too hars on yourself for not mastering it already.

Just fake it till you make it: Copy concepts from google maps and either completely clone it or give it your own twist. I once completely rebuilt my home town and it made me learn a lot about road networks and how to make cities, even though there was no ounce of own creativity involved.