You're standing in a garden, abandoned since that rainstorm, fixed in place. The world grows around you. Nobody remembers that you were there, nobody knows what you were working on, nobody cares, or has cared for years, other than you. You still care, though, so you spend the days watching the flowers grow and wishing for the thing that would free you up to return to what you were doing, to what you were made to do. Not so much a calling as a design.
One day some people come to your garden, gaze at you in wonder and surprise. The hollow sounds you make as they bang against you. You marvel at their soft bones, soft tissue, you can't even imagine what it would be like to be so vulnerable. They give you the first thing you ask for, the only thing you actually need, and you're free again. At least for a little while you are ready to go back to what you were doing before your unfortunate circumstances. But now they are telling you that something is still wrong with you. You're empty inside, they say, you don't have anything inside to give. This is not true, and anybody who was really paying attention would know this but they take you at surface value and they can't see what they think you should have, these people with their soft skin and their pumping hearts. You know it is an important thing to have, and they say you don't have it, and you believe them.
There are advantages to you. You don't burn the way they do; anger frightens you but it can't hurt you, similarly shame and jealousy. You cry easily and this hurts you in myriad ways, but tears are how the body says what the mouth cannot. Other than the ability to fiercely defend your friends you don't experience much passion and the only damage you sustain are a few dents that could be knocked out if you cared. You can remember when you were young and shiny but it doesn't seem to bother you that you aren't any more. There's just the one thing you need and the other thing you want because you've been told you don't have it.
Hold out your hand and they will fill it with velvet and sawdust only. You will be no different; you already had what they told you that you lack. It's more important to remember to ask for what you need, ask again, ask until someone understands. Otherwise you will find yourself back in that garden, rusting in place, useless to everyone.