Ok well i figured it out... apparently having the "hand strength" setting at anything below half makes your character weak af
i thought hand strength meant how strong interactions and stuff like fondling and touching are when i grab a character, not literally how fucking strong my hands are. They need to add a tooltip or something for that because why would i want to not be able to pick shit up?
(i literally spent an hour trying to figure this out and it turns out it was a setting in-game and not my bindings being fucked or some shit like that

)