Something that might help is understanding a very fundamental thing about computers: they are very, very stupid.
Essentially, they don't/can't know anything about anything, at the most fundamental levels of their construction, and have to be hand-held every tiny step of the way.
A computer is essentially a highly complex arrangement of on/off switches - there's little else fundamentally in there doing anything at all other than something causing the first switch to cycle between on and off states and cascade to all the rest (this isn't entirely accurate but it's close enough to make te point).
This gives rise to situations where in order to create greater levels of complexity, lots of unintuitive, and seemingly even pointless things need to be done. For example: assigning letterbox addresses to every discrete portion of memory. Then things like "I want to read the values from this part of memory up to this part" require laboriously adding 1 to a value (a pointer) that tracks which address the computer is currently "thinking" about. It's so stupid it needs to remember where it is all the time like this, or it can't do anything.
Because C is very close to this mundane and laborious fundamental architecture, it (usefully in that case) deals with concepts like "pointers".
In languages at just a bit higher level, the language internals deal with pointers so that we as programmers don't have to.
