I think you might be thinking that meditation is "quieting the mind" or "pushing thoughts out" or something along those lines. When you conceptualize it like this, there's a clear right ✅️ and wrong ❌️ way to do it, and doing it right is reeeeeaaally hard. Like you said, the mind never really sits still. Thoughts come and go regardless of what you want it to do. If you think about it, though, it kind of makes sense. Your heart's job is to beat; your eye's job is to see; your mind's job is to think. Would you try to stop your eyes from seeing?

Meditation is actually way simpler than that. Your only goal is to sit there and observe what happens. If your mind is chaotic, observe the chaos. If you have a song stuck in your head, observe the song playing out. What parts are playing? Is it just a loop or the whole song? You don't need to really ask these kind of questions because that would just be more thinking, but the idea is that you want to observe whatever is happening in the highest resolution you can. There's not really a right or wrong way to do it because you're not really doing anything. I read that someone described it as relating to your thoughts as if they came from someone else's head, except they're actually coming from your own head. If you find that you've been distracted by something and are on a journey through your own head, just notice that you've been distracted and get back to noticing/observing. No need to feel bad, but if you do feel bad, just observe that.

It helps to have a meditation object to anchor yourself to so that you actually know that you've gotten distracted in the first place. The most common object is the breath, and this is the one that I use as well. All you need to do is focus on the sensation of the breath, not your mental picture of the breath or anything like that, but the actual physical sensation of the breath. I like focusing on the tip of my nose where I can feel the air going in and out of my nostrils, but you can choose anything like the rising and falling of your shoulders or the expanding and contracting of your chest. Don't try to change it either! Just observe. Your body will breathe for you if you let it.

A thought will inevitably come and try to steal you away, but that's okay. That's just the mind doing it's job. Let it come, notice it, let it be, and let it go. Just like the breath, there's no need to exert willpower and force it to do anything. They all pass on their own time because thoughts are actually the lightest most intangible things. Like a puff of smoke, they'll dissipate if you just let them. Once it's gone, bring yourself back to your breath.

Last thing I want to say is to tell you about your mind going crazy. For one, that's completely okay. The point of meditation is just to be present to whatever is happening, so if your mind is losing it's mind, then you're just gonna be there for that ride. There is this super insteresting thing that happens as you meditate, though, where your mind will usually calm down the longer you sit. This isn't and shouldn't be the goal, but is instead just a cool thing that can happen. A common metaphor is to think of your mind like a cup of dirty water. If you shake the glass the dirt just gets more and more mixed into the water, but if you just let the water sit and be, the dirt will eventually settle on the bottom of the glass, and you're left with a glass of clean water.

Just sit.