The Year That Rocked My World 🫨
(Spoiler Alert: it has a happy ending)
If you’re on Instagram right now (January 2026), your feed, your reels, and honestly… the images playing behind your eyelids when you try to fall asleep, are probably full of people posting their 2016 carousel dumps.
For most people, it’s a highlight reel.
Cute outfits. Fun trips. Peak youth-energy. Living their best life.
And listen, I don’t get FOMO. But seeing all of that made me want to take a little stroll down my own memory lane.
And whew. When I opened my photos for that year, it hit me like a wave.
Before I could even get past February, my throat tightened and my eyes filled with tears. I already knew what was coming in March.
2016 wasn’t just “a year” for me. It was the start of one of the hardest seasons of my life. Honestly, one of the toughest decades of my life and also the one that brought some of the deepest growth.
At the beginning of that year, though, I was thriving. Personally and professionally, I felt on top of the world. I was the healthiest and strongest I’d ever been, my business was growing, and I had just gotten engaged the summer before. I was riding that whole “next chapter” high.
January 2016 Jaylen truly believed nothing bad could happen to her. She thought she was fully in control of her life. And bad news? Please. That was for other people.
🎶 La-la-La-la-La 🎶
(Living in my own little fantasy world.)
So yeah… the morning of March 29, 2016? Absolutely not on my radar.
I had a soul dog named Oliver. A 9-year-old Westie who walked through my late teens and early twenties with me. Breakups, moves, messy seasons, growing pains. He was there for all of it. Our bond ran deep in that quiet, soul-level way only pet parents really understand.
In my mind, we were growing old together. Which I KNOW is delusional. I’ve had dogs my whole life. I understood how this works. But somehow, I convinced myself Oliver was different. That I would never have to feel that kind of loss with him.
In early January 2016, I noticed he started bumping into things. At first, I brushed it off. Maybe he was tired. Maybe the lighting was weird. But then it kept happening. Door frames. Furniture. Corners of walls.
And his eyes… that spark he always had felt dimmer. Almost like a thousand-yard stare, as if he was looking through me instead of at me. That’s when my worst fears started to creep in.
We went to appointment after appointment for months. Tests. Waiting rooms. So many “we’re not sure yet.” We never received real answers, just hope mixed with worry after each visit.
Then one morning, everything changed.
Oliver had a seizure. And then another. And then another. 😞
I had never seen him like that before. My heart was pounding, my hands were shaking. I grabbed my keys and rushed him to the vet, crying the whole drive there, begging the universe to please let this be something small. Something fixable.
The vet told me the only way to truly know what was happening was to put Oliver under and run an MRI. And that’s when we finally got clarity.
