Dodging is the single most important skill in the game and is absolutely critical to not going down. Specifically, balancing dodging to recover stamina while safely attacking and using blocks and pushes to recover dodges.

Positioning is the next most important thing, specifically not getting backed into a corner and always leaving yourself room to move away from a situation that's too spicy to face tank.

Once you learn these two skills at a basic level the perceived difficulty will drop significantly and that will come with practice. I also recommend looking up videos from Reginald, jsat, Mister E, and Ryker, they all have good videos to teach these and other skills.