We lost a lot of greats in 2016. Impactful voices such as Prince, Muhammad Ali, Gene Wilder, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, George Michael, Leonard Cohen, and in the last week of that tumultuous year, Carrie Fisher.

Celebrity deaths are an interesting phenomenon in our time of social media. Every time an artist passes, there is an outpouring of love and loss that can only be described as a form of grief, there are always varying levels of sadness and nostalgia as people wax poetic on how the late artist had an impact on their life. I had never understood this, this grief for someone most had never met or didn’t know personally. I remember being perplexed after the death of Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson, wondering why everyone was so sad, I mean, it’s not like they knew them, right?

I had never understood this, until the death of Carrie Fisher.

I grew up on stories like Star Wars, movies and books about ragtag groups of underdogs who fought for justice in the face of great evil. I wanted nothing more than to be part of a story like that, to be a fighter swept up in a grand adventure. When I was little I thought that meant being tough, being big and strong and masculine, I took it upon myself to forgo the dresses and bows my mother wanted me to wear, for in my mind they would only impede me in battle!

I turned my nose up at make up and frivolous fashion, because, even though I secretly really liked all those things, I thought that I couldn’t be strong and pretty, couldn’t be tough and still show emotions, couldn’t be sassy and still “hang with the boys”.

I felt this way until I met Princess Leia, a female protagonist who gets swept up in a ragtag group of rebels, loses everything she knows and loves and still remains strong, and is not afraid to either mouth off to the bad guy, or shoot him with a blaster… whichever comes first.

She was smart, sassy, brave, just as valuable to the story as Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, and she was a princess.

She helped teach a frizzy-haired, scrawny little girl with big dreams and a tendency to shoot off at the mouth that you can be strong and pretty, you can be bold and show emotions, and that being a girl does not make you any less valuable of a fighter than the boys.

Princess Leia changed the way I saw myself, and when I heard the news that Carrie Fisher had passed, I felt like I lost a role model. I finally understood the weird, but very real type of grief that comes with the death of an artist.

Additionally, Fisher was an incredible individual apart from anything she did on screen. She struggled for most of her life with addiction and with bipolar disorder. There is a strength that is evident in living with those things, but is increased ten-fold by speaking about it as candidly about them as she did. She was a valuable advocate for the normalization of mental illness and a hilarious, talented author. (I mean, you have to know you’re pretty great when Meryl Streep plays you in a film about your life.)