We’ve been accused of being lazy, complacent, having everything handed to us on a silver platter, growing up in the boom years without a care in the world. Trust me, I know some of those people.

But on the eve of 2011, I’ve come to the conclusion that my generation is doing the best we can right now. We’re learning the ropes of the so-called real world, figuring out what it means to be a 20-something in the midst of a dismal economy with little job growth and finding ourselves completely lost when it comes to where we’re supposed to go from here.

I graduated from George Washington University in May, and when I started this whirlwind of a year I had no idea what was in store for me. As my friends and I began applying for internships (paid only) and jobs, we all felt massive pressure to secure our futures by graduation day.

Little did I know I would be one of the lucky ones. One moment I was reading Julia Child’s memoir in my dorm room and the next I was interviewing her editor Judith Jones for the Gazette. But before I could get to my desk in the newsroom on South Summer street, I had to accept one of the hardest things to accept: the unknown.

Once I embraced the fact I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I relished it. What more could I do than take one day at a time, see what curve-ball life would throw at me one week to the next?

The question of the unknown has never existed for us before; we’re programmed to know we’ll be in school from kindergarten through college and then we’ll get a job, fall in love by dating someone we met through friends, get married and live happily ever after. False.

We grew up thinking we were supposed to be somewhere by the time we were 25, somebody people talked about by the time we were 30 and settled with life soon after that. Those social “norms” no longer exist; we are rewriting the rules for our generation every day. Our lives are not going to turn out as we originally planned, but when does it ever?

By living through the unknown, I bet you’ll learn some new things about yourself. Here are a few things I learned this year.

“Everything will work out in the end” was possibly the most irritating phrase of 2010, but I learned if you have a little faith, it slowly becomes a reality. People ask me if writing is what I want do forever, and I tell them I am blissfully happy writing right now.

Looking in the rearview mirror I see the Vineyard, New York, and Washington, D.C. I’ve learned you can always go back and be welcomed with open arms.

The best kinds of friends are those who don’t judge you for anything, make you laugh until you cry and push you until you’re ready to jump by yourself. They’re the ones that hear what you’re saying; they don’t just listen.

And finally, there are no rules except whatever makes you happy. Don’t do anything that breaks your essence.

We are inherently plan-oriented people, so I say to my fellow 20-somethings, let loose and live a little. It looks as though we’ll be living with the unknown for a while, but as history stands, we have a pretty good chance of making it out alive.