I used to hang out around the movie theater of my local mall, right around the crossroads of buttered popcorn and life-sized cardboard promotional cutouts. So many times, I’d glance around and see masses of people walk out of those darkened rooms, still hazy and quiet and tingling from whatever they’d just watched. That’s the kind of experience you want to have after paying 12 dollars for almost two hours of a story beamed into the back of your eyes, at least.

Reflecting on this year has gotten me thinking about the profound impact that entertainment has had in my life.

I remember listening to 80’s classics on the radio during long, sunset-lit drives that clung along the Californian coast, or movie marathons that played in the background of so many winter breaks spent lounging around, just enjoying each other’s company. I remember rereading books dozens of times until my personality was developed out of a cut-and-paste amalgam of my favorite heroes.

And it’s natural for that kind of exposure to impact the way you feel and think. Fictional characters hold up a mirror that reflects all of humanity’s traits and flaws, and the real actors that portray these characters do much of the same. Where the ancients had their gods’ stories passed down in epic poems or written in the starry skies, we have dozens of trashy gossip magazines constantly airing celebrities’ dirty laundry. Their struggles in the public eye become warning tales as much as they are entertainment; the modern day Icarus is Britney Spears circa 2007.

And when those figures die, like they have so often along the course of this year, a part of you that they helped you understand aches. To have even those giants fall from grace and struggle with depression or addiction humanizes them, and death does so even further. So we take to Twitter and Facebook and express that grief by sharing our stories of how a book or movie saved our lives. Some might consider this kind of mourning as an act of circle-jerk performance art that follows whatever hashtag is currently trending. Maybe that’s true of some people, but there is also so much genuine heartbreak that happens when your love and appreciation for a person has nowhere to go.

Grieving en masse isn’t so much of a performance as is it a rehearsal for when tragedy strikes again on a more personal level. I dealt with my first death in the family very shortly before the death of a classmate, and I had no clue how to process any of it. My heart broke every day, I felt scared, confused, raw— I’d cry even more because I thought I wasn’t grieving correctly.

Mourning a person who played a part in creating the soundtrack of your life is a genuine kind of hurt, but a bearable one that is practice for future unbearable ones. When I was scared of the dark I could turn the lights on and study the inside of my closet or the space under my bed. I could find comfort and weaken the fear with familiarity. But how can death ever feel familiar?

So we take to Twitter, and we cry, and we think of how their stories and their struggles help us understand our own. And we do our best to cope.