We seem to have lost a lot of cultural figures this past year, icons of music and Hollywood who loom large in our minds. These losses can be sad and even upsetting, but the outpouring of grief over celebrities has always felt a little foreign to me.

And yet!, I cried for Carrie Fisher.

This year we lost people like Prince, David Bowie, and George Michael. Others have written, better than I, about the impact of these people on the broader cultural consciousness, on the queerness of their persons and/or their personal aesthetics, and how their art and their public lives helped broaden our understanding of how a man could or ought live. For them and for this I am both indebted and grateful, but they are not people with whom I have ever identified. (I think it safe to say my upbringing was sheltered.)

Queer representation in art is limited. I am happy it is improving, and sometimes I wonder what it might’ve been like for me to see a little of myself in the media I consumed. Instead, it was an endless stream of disproportionately white, straight men — men with whom I could never really identify. (It took me a very long while to figure out why. Hindsight is more obvious.)

But Princess Leia!

For a sci-fi nerd like me, Star Wars was an endlessly enjoyable escape. I started reading the Expanded Universe Star Wars novels in middle school (or was it elementary?) and didn’t stop for… quite a while. Still, I never wanted to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker; such a sympathy seemed baffling at the time. Luke was a bit whiny, and Han was — well, I happen to like nice men. Leia Organa, though: what wasn’t to like? Assertive, in control, powerful, making a difference, and all this, with an outfit of gleaming white.

It was a glimmer of queer; on obvious stereotype, in retrospect, but still a figure to whom I could look and say, “Yes, this.” (Or, “More of this, please,” since I was always a bit vexed at the short shrift she was given in the material. Why couldn’t everyone see what I did? Even this marked my first foray into what would later be called fanfic, with what I can only assume was a painfully bad treatment in which I tried to re-center Leia as the most important piece of the Star Wars universe.)

It’s obvious to me now that a princess from a galaxy far, far away provided a younger me with a little shelter, a little relief — an imaginative space where I could be a touch more authentic, a bit truer to myself, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

Of course, Carrie Fisher was far more than her role as Princess Leia. She had smart and witty and incisive things to say about our culture and the nature of celebrity, and she was a celebrated novelist, among her many other talents. And further still, she was unflinchingly brave in talking about mental health and illness, and helping to de-stigmatize the topic in our society. For all this she deserves honor and recognition.

I’m grateful that the actress behind Princess — and General — Leia was one of such strength and conviction, and who lived an artful life. But I cried for Carrie Fisher not because hers was a life lived with excellence (though it was), but because of what she meant for me when I was just a young kid in North Carolina, even though I didn’t know it at the time.