My legs bounce.

My fingers drum.

My feet tap.

Why?

I like to do absolutely nothing just as much as the next person. Anyone who knows me would say, “oh she’s constantly in motion.” One of my most impressive talents is the ability to lay and do nothing for hours. So why is it that I can’t seem to sit still when I’m told to?

In church, school, assemblies, graduations, dinners, I’m always twitching.

A lot of kids are. If you look around you, wherever you are, you’ll see an odd thing. Teenagers twitching. Teenagers in some form of constant movement.

I can’t sit still. My brother can’t sit still. Most of my friends can’t sit still. High school classrooms are rapidly filling with twitching teens.

There has to be a reason.

Maybe it’s because we were raised in a generation that has been drilled with this idea that we always have to be moving and doing something. And not just one thing, but multiple things. Running a million miles a minute. Multi-tasking until our brains are soup inside our heads. We’ve never been taught to sit still.

My mother was raised in a Baptist church family, and they sat in pews every Sunday for church with their grandmother behind them, pinching them if they slouched or got distracted. Because of the way my mother was raised, you’ll never see her leg bouncing when she has to sit. But kids now aren’t being raised that way. Nowadays, if a kid can’t sit still they aren’t made to or sent to go run off some of their energy. They’re drugged.

Look around again. See all the kids that aren’t moving? See the eight-year-olds who somehow can sit through hour-long lessons without moving? See the children just sleeping instead of bouncing?

In ten years you won’t see teens bouncing anymore; all those twitching teens will be twitching adults. And they’ll be replaced with a new generation of teens, ones who walk sluggishly through life in a constant state of drugged stupor.