I did everything right……..

This is one of the hardest things I still don’t understand about life……

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Recently, I went grocery shopping for just one item, Yam. I had been craving yam for a long time, in any form really, whether boiled, fried, roasted it didn’t matter…I really just wanted to eat yam.

Since I moved to Canada, I haven’t really enjoyed eating yam like I did back home, most especially because it’s not easily gotten here. It’s mostly only available at the African stores and sadly, the closest African store to me is almost an hour 30 mins away by bus/train.

The distance discourages me a lot, but on this particular day, my cravings were much stronger than my unwillingness to travel far so I decided make the trip from Vancouver to Surrey, to buy just a tuber of yam. I worried a little bit about finding a good one but then I remembered my mum’s yam picking strategy.

From growing up with my mom, following her to markets and watching her shop for yams, I noticed she had a pattern to picking the right yam. It’s always very important to her that she picks the right ones because my mom loves yam and she loves it when it comes out very white and very soft when boiled. Once it turns brownish or reddish, she can’t eat it. And somehow, she has always been able to pick the good ones.

The way she does it is simple but intentional.

She never focuses on the size or shape of the yam, some yams are long, some are short, some look pretty, some look very rough but she ignores all of that. What she does instead is peel a tiny part of the yam’s body to reveal the inside color.

If it’s pure white, that’s the first good sign.

Then she waits a few minutes to see if the peeled part stays white or turns reddish. If it stays white, she concludes that it’s a good yam and buys it. That is the strategy I learned from my mom.

So when I went to buy yam, I did exactly that.

I wasn’t bothered about the size or shape, I just picked one, peeled a small part, and it was white….perfectly white, so I waited. It stayed white. I waited longer. It still stayed white.

So I concluded it was a good yam.

The yam was quite expensive, but I didn’t care because I was craving it badly. I also traveled quite far to get it, like I literally went to another city to buy it and through the entire journey back home, the part I peeled remained white. It looked perfect.

I was excited. I was honestly so excited that I finally had yam and would satisfy my craving. So of course, immediately I got home, I decided to slice it open so I could cook it.

My mom also made the best boiled yams and having watched her cook it a million times, I learned she didn’t really like to slice yam from the middle. She would slice from the edge and cut only the portion she needs, then keep the rest.

So I followed her strategy as well and started slicing from one end.

Immediately I sliced into it, I saw that the yam was rotten in the middle.

The entire middle.

Completely rotten.

Only the edges were white.

I was shocked. I was sad. I was angry. I felt so many emotions at once.

At first, I thought maybe it was just that section, so I kept slicing further into it… and then I saw that entire yam was rotten inside.

The whole tuber.

I had traveled far, paid a lot of money, followed the exact strategy I was taught, and still ended up with a bad yam.

I felt cheated. I felt scammed. My first instinct was to call the store owner and confront them for selling rotten yam.

But then I realized something.

The store owner might not have known as well….

So I sat with my disappointment, constantly rethinking how I did everything I was supposed to do. I checked it the right way. I followed the process. I waited. I confirmed. And it still turned out bad.

And then, I mourned.

I mourned my time.
I mourned my money.
I mourned the craving that would not be satisfied.

Now since that day, I’ve found it very difficult to spend money on yam again. I now live with the fear that if I buy another one, it might be rotten inside too and that I might just end up wasting my money and my time all over again.

This whole experience has been sitting very heavily on my heart recently, most especially because I’ve been craving yam again.

I mean I know I could easily just go buy some already cooked ones at the Nigerian restaurant, but I fear it wouldn’t satisfy my cravings. I also would just really love to have yams in my pantry, so I could make it for myself whenever I want.

Anyway, I think what I’m trying to say is, this really bad disappointment that I had, has really made me realize again, how in life, you can follow the process, you can do everything right, you can be careful, intentional, prayerful, patient and still end up with the wrong result.

And when that happens, you don’t just lose the outcome.

You lose time.
You lose money.
You lose trust in your own decision-making.
You lose confidence in yourself.

And most times……you never get those things back.

This is one of the most unfair parts of life to me.

Doing everything right and still getting it wrong.

There’s something deeply painful about that kind of loss because there’s no clear place to put the blame. There’s nothing to fix. Nothing to redo. It just… happened.

And now, you’re left sitting with the consequences.

Like me, standing in my kitchen, staring at a fully rotten yam that looked perfect on the outside.

Even now, after throwing the yam away, I still feel like the rottenness followed me home. Like being exposed to it came with consequences I cannot undo.

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Anyway…….again, this is what has been sitting on my mind today.

I don’t know if anyone has figured out how to navigate this feeling, the fear of trying again after doing everything right and still losing. But if you have, I would honestly love to hear it.

You can leave it in the comments or send me a message if you know me personally, because this one feels heavy and I do really want to know if the fear goes away…..

How do you trust yourself again?

How do you go back to the market and buy yam again without fear that it might still be rotten inside?

And if you don’t already know by now…

This post is not about yam.

Thank you for reading.

With love,
Beks 💜