Is it an ending or a beginning?

I love stories where the ending is the beginning, or the beginning starts first with the ending. Or, the beginning is the core of the story, the tight center, and the narrative flows out and away from it, a widening aperture. 

I rarely see the end of a year as an ending. Or as a beginning. In fact, I never feel this kind of transition in January (I feel it more in September, probably because I've inculcated the academic calendar to my rhythms and can't help but think of the end of summer as the "end" of the year). 

This all reminds me of a psychic I once saw. I asked her why I was so attracted to the spiral symbol. She told me to stop thinking about it as a two-dimensional thing, that I should stretch it out like a spiral staircase that never ends. 

For me, that was a watershed moment. I began to recognize personal, creative energy as a kind of ebb and flow, or contraction/expansion, instead of a path walked around a circular labyrinth. 

2018 has been equal parts contraction and expansion. I:

What constitutes "real" writing? Money? Effort? Creativity?

Last summer, a friend of mine who writes across genres asked me how my writing life was. I told him, Great! I'm writing every day and getting paid for it! Which is still true, and which I'm still extremely excited to be doing. 

Then he asked me, but are you doing any real writing? I had to pause because I didn't actually know what he meant. You know, he said, creative writing (fiction, poetry, etc.)? 

It never occurred to me to designate writing in this way.