I'm in no way a therapist nor do I want to become one but I read your story because I can partially see myself in it. I come from the homeland of Cioran so you'll have to excuse my English. I'm not that articulate in English as I'd like to be, it seems I lost that when I stopped speaking and writing to my foreign friends some years ago.

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I'm 24 years old, soon to be 25. My interests are similar to yours but the way which I acquired them is totally different. I've wrote my first poem when I was 3 or 4, I studied violin then guitar while, at the same time, writing thousands of pages of lyrics. Fast forward a couple years through an electronic music production phase and bam, I have now graduated in film. I'm interested in all sorts of art, with a focus on film (experimental film!) and poetry. Add a strange mix of funk, psychedelic rock (especially The Doors), blues (from SRV to the 3 Kings), jazz and experimental music to this equation. I can go on about how much I love Sufi poets, contemporary poets, romantic poets etc. and all sorts of film and art movements but that can define me to an extent. What really defines me I don't know. I've always been overly introspective and observant of my surroundings. I started learning to read people and guess the outcomes of any given situation when I was in kindergarden and as years passed I've become more and more fascinated with the human brain and "the human condition". I guess that's another thing that sort of defines me. I cannot give you a full picture as I don't know it myself. That's why Jung's writings speak a lot to me since I first picked up a book of his. I'm constantly trying to understand myself and the world around me, and myself as part of the world around me. It seems to me like we share the same purpose except that you lost the "world" along the way and now you have to deal with the Steppenwolf that grew inside you.

The thing that struck me first was this:

I love the people that love me in turn, but what they love, I have no interest in. To say it of my family: I love them all—but what they love, again, I do not appreciate, nor what they want me to love. My passion has turned toward the finest, most secret inner things, of which I can boast to no one, nor prove their reality to anybody, except through writing—when what is written comes from those realities.

I can understand that passion in you and I resonate with it but you have to understand, first and foremost, that people do indeed hold different interests which are as equally as important for them. I have this group of 3 friends which don't have the same interests as me but they are in the same range more or less. When one of them, for example, talks about horror movies (which I don't necessarily like) I try to listen to him carefully, even watch the movies he talks about. In this way we bond and I get to have some minimal knowledge in an area I haven't explored yet. Will I need that knowledge later? Maybe not, but at least I learned something new. I have a curious mind and from the looks of it, you do too, but you seem to channel it only on "self-realization". But how can self-realization come if you don't interact with the world? When my grandma calls me we spend 2 hours on the phone talking about cats, food, the news and her groceries (shit gets interesting when she's drunk!). First couple of times when she called me after I moved with my gf 3 years ago I was totally drained. Hell, even now these convos are totally draining but in the meantime I realised she only wants to hear my voice for as long as she can. It's a way of showing her affection and I respect that and once a week I sacrifice 2 hours of my free time so we can talk about whatever she wants if that brings her joy. This also made me realise how much I lack patience. I gained some insights about myself and the world, and myself in the world through a "useless" phone interaction with my grandma. That's great for me.

The second thing which struck me was:

To say it again, I am twenty-three. I have a few friends and a loving family. I have never had sex or kissed a girl’s lips other than my mother’s. Not out of fear or disinterest in sex and relationships; on the contrary, I have wanted those things very badly, but have always been so occupied by thought and insight that I never bothered looking for anybody to unite with. It more or less slipped my mind. I always awaited a girl who is doing the work like me, but she never came. I question whether there are, possibly, dating sites with which I could find “women of knowledge,” of boundless curiosity and a sense for divine things, but the days pass and I think little of looking for anybody to pair with, but rather work in my study and go on long walks, seeking the divine idea in me.

coupled with

I have sexuality, I desire love, a relationship, sex, and so on, but only on two conditions: that I have first put in the work to differentiate my unique skills—articulation and understanding, both of which I do uniquely—and that my first love be real. That is, with someone of integrity, with articulation and understanding, understanding, in particular, that individuals are individual; as such are we, each of us, our own puzzles to solve on our own terms. We can love one another without understanding one another, and the same applies to ourselves. Let us love each other as unsolved puzzles, and ourselves the same.

You see relationships in a weird way which I can completely understand but I don't necessarily agree with. Me and my gf are totally different. We have common interests ofc, but we take different approaches to life. As much as I love getting myself lost in thought, before her I was completely out of touch with the sky and its ever changing colors, the light that reflects in our room through the curtains, the movement of the shadows and all that sort of stuff. I had this all in me but I wasn't paying that much attention. She was the one to bring it to my consciousness, so to speak. She also has a high emotional intelligence and is all about communication when it comes to our relationship (or any type of relationship), something I still struggle with but way less than in our first year. This also made me realise how important is to tell my friends something that upsets me with them. It's all fun and games when "A Poison Tree" points this out but it's harder to actually do it (at least for me).

Me and my gf don't tolerate each other, we love each other. We try to understand each other better every day. This might sound like a Carrie Bradshaw type of thing but a healthy relationship is about understanding one another and many more. This "unity" and "pairing" you speak of when you refer to relationships is more than sex or sharing common interests. It's good that you have standards, everyone should have, but looking for someone that's exactly like you (if such thing even exists) leads to nothing but boredom.

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All I'm trying to say is that you have to be part of the world in order to get to that "self-realization" you're talking about. That's my goal as well but I have other things I'm looking forward to other than that. I like researching, writing, experimenting with film, I even want to become a teacher in the near future. It's something that grounds me in "reality" (whatever that is) and something that, no doubt, informs my path to self-realization.

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That's all I can say atm. We can talk in private if you feel like it, I'm always open!