Why does my character move but never feel alive?

You know the mechanics. Arcs, timing, weight, follow-through. You have studied all of it. And still the character moves like a puppet, not a creature. You call the missing thing "feel," as if it were magic that some people have and you don't. It is not magic. It is a decision you have not made. A living thing always wants something and resists something else, even in a single step across a room. If you cannot say, in one sentence, what your character wants and fears right now, the animation cannot show it either. The audience is not missing your polish. They are missing your decision. So the work is not more tutorials on secondary motion. The work is choosing, scene by scene, what this creature wants, what stands in its way, and where it hesitates before it commits. Animate that, and the arcs you already know how to draw will start to carry a person, not a diagram.