Hi!
I’m sorry not to be able to offer concrete answers: I’m totally blind, was born this way, and although one of my eyes is shrunken and looks very different from the other, obviously not seeing full and working sets of eyes all around me has kept me from making it into an issue for me. Following that logic through to its conclusion, it would seem to me as if much of the worry and pain you’ve built up around this is, ironically, very visual.

I don’t want to come across as an insensitive ass, but stepping back for a moment, people with far larger physical variances obviously do well. I know couples where one partner has a single hand, or no legs, or no eyes at all. Equally, I grew up in a family where sport was laughing at the partially-sighted people at the eye hospital for not being able to walk in a straight line whilst we waited for my appointment: so I have seen both ends of the spectrum. The wonderful, open, caring nature of happy people or couples in love, and the bitter, resentful, angry people who take their issues out on others. And I can guarantee that people like that would be doing it regardless, if not about your eye then about somebody else’s facial hair, or braces, or scars. It’s almost never about you or how you look, not really. It’s because people are just miserable, or insecure, and find either pleasure or a semblance of security in offloading whatever their troubles are onto others through a convenient obvious visual dysmorphia. People content with their lot rarely feel the need to pick at others, after all.

I have gone on about other people so much in the last paragraph because so often, the step after “I can’t accept myself with my eyes” is “others won’t accept me with them, even if I learn to”. But hopefully, even though I can’t say anything about how you perceive yourself, I’ve given some comfort that if you can work through or around that in time, the world at large will have less trouble with it than you will. I happen to be blind, and I happen to be married to a blind person: that’s not to say how we look isn’t important to us – but I think it does steer the direction of our attention onto other things more readily. I can’t pretend to have any words of comfort about how you perceive yourself that won’t ring hollow right now, but I do hope others chime in and that you can come to accept that you are as much a worthwhile person as anyone else. How attractive someone finds you is holy disproportionate to how you feel about yourself as well, so that person who said they found your eye sexy may well have just been trying to make you feel better, or it could have been a genuine physical turn-on for them. Obviously at this stage you find that idea quite difficult to live with, but that’s not to say it’s not something, in time, that you couldn’t change your perceptions about.

The stark, harsh reality is that magic isn’t going to happen to “fix” your eye. But on the flipside of that, “normal” is just the average of the eyes around us. Norms shift, over time. Everything from the styles of clothes we wear to how deep we submerge ourselves in technology whilst on a bus shifts. Over my lifetime, I’ve gone from being perceived as a baby who’d never amount to anything to an adult with a family, home and relevant, enjoyable job. Public attitudes toward me have shifted from “oh, aren’t you brilliant for coping at home by yourself” as a teen to “shall we go out for a drink after work?” with my blindness falling in significance all the time. I’ve gone from needing half my living room space and 4 electricity outlets just to read a letter to being able to sort the family’s mail as I walk across the room with a camera poking out of my shirt pocket, and from needing to have every menu read to me at a restaurant to picking the place of my own volition and directing whoever’s driving there along the way. In short, from an aimless, resentful person concerned that my disability was an albatross around my neck to recognizing that it’s a cross to bear, that we all have them to a greater or lesser extent, and how we perceive them is often very different to how they are perceived by others and that the reality can lie somewhere in the middle or at a radical extreme, with much of that on me.