There's not many times that after I read a tweet I'm covered in goosebumps, and yet it happened to me twice this week. First on Monday morning when CNN tweeted "The stars look very different today, RIP David Bowie." My heart dropped.

I, by no means, am some David Bowie super fan. I know who he is. I know that he pushed the boundaries and opened doors for oppressed people. I never painted my face like Ziggy Stardust or slicked my hair back like Major Tom. I know one of his albums, a greatest hits album that my parents would play in our crowded town house when I was about four.

So why was I so upset? When I read that David Bowie had died I was crushed. My eyes started to well up and I felt like I had just lost a close friend. As I was getting ready to break out into a full hyperventilated sob, I put on the greatest hits album from my childhood.

As each track played through, I sat overwhelmed with emotions. I remembered that my parents would play the CD around dinner time. Memories of laughing with my siblings as my dad swung me around like a helicopter. I could smell the macaroni and cheese my mom was cooking in the kitchen as my dad worked his hardest to tire us out so we'd get to sleep on time. My sister and I used to swing our hips to each "Ch-" in the song "Changes."

I never thought this was out of the ordinary, a child singing along to David Bowie's greatest hits. I remember when I used "Young Americans" in a presentation in fourth grade. My teacher wrote a comment on the back of the rubric sheet saying, "Good work, and tell your parents I like their music taste!"

The second time I got goosebumps from a tweet was when @ElusiveJ tweeted, "Thinking about how we mourn artists we've never met. We don't cry because we knew them, we cry because they helped us know ourselves."

I saw that and thought yes. Finally how I was feeling was put into words. David Bowie was so much more than some man on the cover of a CD album. David Bowie opened my eyes to a love of 80s dance tracks, which fueled my love for music, which eventually decided my career path into music. Bowie gave me a glimpse into my parents' lives, a snippet of what they were listening to in the clubs as youngsters. David Bowie has even helped me impress some music hipsters at a bar once. It wasn't until after he died the impact he had on my life. His music was the soundtrack to some of my happiest memories.

Artists have a unique and very difficult job. They help us feel something that we didn't even know we needed to feel. They also help us come into our own, because they are confident in who they are. David Bowie never followed the normal rules, he stepped on toes, pushed boundaries, and confused a hell of a lot of people. And it didn't phase him one bit.

So cheers to you David Bowie. The most courageous man that the music industry has ever seen and the man that opened my eyes to an entire world.