Okay, all you fellas, hang in here with me on this article. We’re going to skip the sports illustration and go straight to more female territory: giving birth. But what I want to say applies to us all.

A great majority of creative projects start out with a twinkle in the eye, a vision for the future, passion, and bit of fun. In the middle, you have aches and pains, weariness, maybe a little nausea as you and the project grow, and sheer wonder as you start to feel your new “baby” move and come to life, independent of you yet still inside you.

But then comes that final month. The weight of this project pulls down heavily. You can’t sleep. There’s no room for eating. Little feet kick you in the diaphragm and knock the breath out of you. And all the little fingers of your project seem able to grab under your ribs and turn you inside out. The due date approaches.

Those final days, while perhaps miserable, have nothing on the regular pains that grip your abdomen as you enter the labor of birth. Maybe your baby is still upside down (okay, right side up), and you have to reach deep and turn it around quickly. Maybe this little project fails to launch and needs some outside intervention, a process that affects your hormones and emotions. But here you are. The pain grows intense. Waves of labor crash down on you in shorter and shorter intervals, and you think, “I quit! I don’t want to do this anymore.”

And that feeling is exactly why I’m subjecting you to a birth analogy and not a Super Bowl run or an attempt to scale a mountain. Because in those other scenarios, you can give up. You can go home. But not with this one. You will give birth, or you will die trying.

When you reach that final phase before birth—obstetricians call it “transition”—you will feel weary and weak. You will feel as though you can’t go on. But you can. You have to. Experts know that often all you need is a reminder of how much you have already accomplished, how strong you are, how close you are, and that you are not alone. Then you can tuck your head down and finish the good work of bringing that baby into this world.

So is your creative work just a means to a Super Bowl ring? Or is it a part of you that you’re ready to push out into the world to make our lives more joyful because of its existence?

Keep going. You can do it. I’m right here by your side.