I play street fighter too, and the whole reason I played monk is because he looked like Dudley, since PIE Smug was one of my favorite players to watch at the time. He gets really fun when you get all your skills and you can juggle and ground combo infinitely, and I wouldn't even say that it's extremely technical, doing combos is easy once you get all your skills. That being said, I feel your pain one hundred percent. Staying alive as monk was not easy, especially since I was used to having really tanky classes with ridiculous super armor.
I feel as if this post was just to vent your frustration rather than a legitimate cry for help, but I'm going to assault you with a load of monk tips from a really scrubby street fighter player in the off chance you are planning to stick with monk: 1. First and foremost, the basic stuff. You absolutely need to make sure to memorize the commands for the skills that cancel out of duck and sway. Bind Duck/Sway to comfortable keys, and make sure you're always using will driver. Make sure you bind smasher to something comfortable too, it has invincibility. 2. If you're dead set on avoiding attacks in a flashy manner, sway diagonally for more distance, then duck back in once it's safe. Alternatively, you can duck behind the target, and then duck cancel and start attacking them while the attack animation is going on. Just don't get to close, or you'll get hit anyways.
If you can grab them, just do that instead. Your grab stops any attacks and has a ton of invincibility. Alot of bosses are grab invincible though.
Otherwise, just keep your distance and spacing. Walking/sprinting is a viable method of avoidance as well, and when learning to control duck and sway it might be easier.
And remember, you're not invincible during duck and sway. You're considered otg. This means projectile and grab invincibility, but everything else will still hurt you. So make sure to duck/sway in advance.
The fact that priests usually don't do well early game in general, coupled with the fact that you're facing enemies that show up later at level 45+, means that the 20-30 grind will be absolute suffering. It's over quick, though, and finding a party shouldn't be too hard if you're on east because will driver, strike, and heal are still pretty decent support skills on their own. I wouldn't be surprised if you're done with that section by the time I finish writing this essay.
If you can help it, use a totem. If you get a +9 axe for whatever reason, I guess you could use that instead, but I'd stick with totems.
If your play style is really reckless like mine, and you like to charge in to groups of enemies, remember that chopping hammer has super armor when you level mastery and is excellent for doing what I just said. Exquisite combo is a really good ranged combo starter that can be duck canceled into anything to start massive combo strings. Sidewinder is really good in PvE for staying a safe distance away from tough enemies, then starting a combo as soon as they're open. As you'll learn in PvP, though, it's not a true combo, so there is a chance they'll just use a super armor skill after you pull them in.
I only got my monk to level 66 if that means anything to you, because I switched to f. slayer for the event bonuses (and because demon slayer looked like Ivy Valentine from Soul Calibur).
If you want a really powerful class that basically destroys everything in PvE, Asura is a tanky mid ranged character that's good for beginners. If you want to avoid everything in a flashy manner, rogue does that, but don't play her, because leveling her is way worse than monk.
After writing this extremely long post this I just realized that this may have been an elaborate flame bait.