But you MUST break this fixation on love as the cure to all of your ills. If you found love right now, you would run it straight into the ground in seconds.
In the long run, you will find love. Right now...you need to sign up for art classes, dance classes, yoga, or cooking classes— or all of the above.
You need to be active and be around people, all kinds of different people, young and old.
You need to practice accepting yourself, with all of your quirks, in the company of other human beings. You need to be open to the world around you.
You need to move through the world by listening to other people, without trying to prove that you're good enough for them. Just exist and be your shy self.
Have lunch, have coffee, and continue to work hard on the things that won't dry up and blow away:
Your health, your career, your little art projects or poems or essays, your odd new half interests, the complicated folds of your sensitivity and your darkness, and your belief in a world that wants you to be happy.

(from Heather Harilesky's response to an Ask Polly letter, published in The Awl)