Bear It With Me: A Different Kind of Ask

We say “bear with me” all the time. It’s a familiar phrase, tucked into emails and apologies, muttered when we fumble our words or drop the ball: “Bear with me, I’m figuring it out.” “Bear with me, this might take a minute.” 

But lately, I’ve been thinking about how different it would be—not just semantically, but emotionally—if instead of asking someone to bear with me, I asked them to bear it with me.

Saying that or something like,

 “Ride with me.”

“Hold me down.”

“Tap in.” 

“Pull up on me.” 

“Hold space.”

These, too, are the expressions we use to request patience, usually when we’re not quite meeting expectations—our own or someone else’s. But that tiny shift (in bear it)—a single pronoun—matters I think.  “Wait this out while I get myself together.” Bear it with me says, “This is heavy. Will you hold some of it too?”

It’s a different kind of ask.

I’m not trying to romanticize suffering or suggest we become martyrs for one another. But I am suggesting we rethink what it means to be in relationship—personal, professional, spiritual, romantic, platonic, or otherwise—when someone hits a rough patch. Instead of asking others to simply be patient while we falter or fall behind, what would it mean to ask them to be in it with us, even briefly? Not as saviors or spectators, but as companions who get that being human sometimes means being a little late, a little distracted, a little broken, a little less than what you expected?

Is that okay?

I imagine a kind of mutual agreement: I will not expect you to carry my pain. But I might ask you to let it inconvenience you—not forever, not catastrophically, but meaningfully. To say: This is what I’m going through. Will you bear it with me?

There’s vulnerability in that. But there’s also dignity.

Because at its core, “bear it with me” is a profound kind of trust. It’s saying: I believe you're someone who can hold space for what is hard. I believe you understand that people are not always at their best, and that’s not always a problem that needs solving.

I am thinking of this now because the other day, I was playfully debating with my cousin about what it means to release hurt without needing closure or apology. She said that she’s found peace in simply accepting that some people don’t have the capacity to be who you need them to be. They can’t give what they don’t have. And once you accept that, you stop waiting for the impossible.

I understood her wisdom. But I gently countered that often it’s not about capacity. Sometimes, people do have the capacity to treat us with care or respect or honesty—they just choose not to. 

And rather than accept that at face value, I’ve learned to sit with a different kind of question:

What would cause you to treat me this way? What don’t I know about your story, your fears, your unresolved wounds, even the stuff that YOU can’t access within YOURSELF that makes this behavior possible—or even necessary—for you?

I don’t go around excusing harm, welll, not anymore, but it’s about recognizing that there’s often a chaos beneath the surface we’re never fully privy to. 

I’ve been there. I’ve watched someone rewrite the story of our connection so thoroughly, so painfully, that I almost couldn’t recognize myself in their version. It didn’t make sense. Not on the surface. Not if you looked at the facts. But then I realized: if I’m confused by their behavior, if I feel disoriented and unmoored by their version of events, then they must be living inside that confusion, too.

Because no one abandons connection, or distorts truth and tears down a person they once loved for no reason. There’s always a story beneath the story—some inner chaos that demands narrative control. And sometimes that chaos shows up as coldness…or detachment…or blame...or even hatred.

And so I’ve stopped asking "Why are you doing this to me?" and started wondering, "What part of you believes you need to?"

The shift from “bear with me” to “bear it with me”changes everything. It isn’t just a linguistic curiosity—it’s an invitation to rethink how we relate to each other in both personal and public life.

There’s a strange kind of peace in that that, one that makes me wonder…what if we all had the space to say, ‘I honestly dont know what the he-- is wrong with me at this moment. And maybe I never will. But will you bear it with me?”

If we take it seriously, it holds the potential to alter how institutions think about care and human worth.

If you understand me, then keep in mind that in spaces like schools, clinics, courts, or social service agencies—places where people show up already carrying invisible loads—“bear it with me” could become a guiding principle. It asks us to move beyond policies that merely tolerate hardship and toward practices that acknowledge and respond to it.

Too often, our schools, for instance, demand polish and performance without context. Students are expected to achieve without ever being asked what they’re holding. Teachers are expected to support everyone else’s healing while their own struggles go unseen. Parents are judged for disengagement without inquiry into what’s destabilizing their household. In these moments, institutions ask people to bear with us—to be patient with underfunded programs, delayed services, one-size-fits-all responses. But rarely do institutions say: we see what you’re carrying. Can we bear some of it with you?

What would change if they did?

Policies could be redesigned with dignity in mind. Instead of framing accommodations or exceptions as deficits, they could be seen as signs of shared investment. Professional development could teach educators how to sit with students’ realities instead of rushing to correct or control them. Staff meetings could become spaces where people not only speak but are held, even briefly, in their truth.

This doesn’t mean lowering standards—it means raising humanity. It means recognizing that real accountability includes empathy. It means designing systems that don’t just perform care, but practice it—systems that understand support isn’t always about solving, but sometimes just about showing up differently.

So maybe it starts small. A conversation. A policy memo. A classroom interaction. A moment where someone says: You don’t have to be perfect right now. I see you’re carrying something. I can’t fix it—but I can bear it with you.

If enough people in enough places chose that posture, even occasionally, we might find ourselves living inside institutions that feel less like machinery and more like community. Please Like and Subscribe. (And comment). Friends, these are snippets of a much longer conversation that I am hoping to have, with you, about the future of our schools.