Growing up and facing the harshness of life is universally challenging, more so for people who find it hard to define and control their emotional range.

My unregretful opinion is that Mob Psycho is a crazily well-crafted story and a wonderful anime.

It can “deceive” you because of its animation, hilarious and mockingly funny at times, top-tier and outworldly during the fast-paced bits. I’m sure we can all agree on this. It’s like we get initiated into its world, one full of art and creative experiments: I sometimes felt like I was living in the drawing sheets, experiencing both scribbles and doodles and also final, detailed and perfect creations. It was a great process to witness as a spectator and conveyed the talent of the artist, the director, and the animators on a deep level.

The story itself is as simple as that: pretty to watch, and simple to follow. Kageyama, nicknamed “Mob”, is a middle school student who was born with psychic powers. He looks apathetic and peaceful all the time, enough to let a grown-up man employ him, underpay him, and carry him around to make a career out of psyching counseling. With such premises, and expecting something similar from the author of One Punch Man, the show is hilarious, uplifting, worthy of watching, exciting, enjoyable, and ridiculous to the right amount. I wouldn’t elaborate on the depth of the characters because it’s there, and it’s tangible. The supporting characters are as well-rounded as Mob, and their backstories are all different and relevant. I couldn’t find a meaningful flaw in this respect. It’s a funny, supernatural action anime with lots of fights and it keeps you glued to the screen, but it doesn’t rely solely on that.

What I found out while diving into the real core of Mob Psycho 100 (and then Mob Psycho 100 II, but that's another story) is a moving story of a little boy trying to make sense out of his emotions, his social life at school, the relationship with his brother and the strong responsibilities behind his powers. Related to that, the important, very anime-friendly, and yet simple lesson – that NEVERTHELESS some of us people didn’t have the privilege or the willingness to learn – is that we shouldn’t take advantage of power to oppress others. Mob is young but already knows this truth: when he feels emotions at their maximum level, he becomes dangerous for everyone around him. He doesn’t know anyone who might help him control his powers once he’s reached his limits so he prefers “not to feel” most of the time. It’s a reasonable choice but it comes at a price: he's indecisive, people find him dull and irrelevant, he cannot communicate well and the only person he’s open with is a deceiver (a “sensei” we learn to know and loves the boy, but still) who takes advantage of his loneliness and his powers. When involved in something unexpected or unforeseen that doesn’t have anything to do with exorcisms and psychic powers, Mob hesitates or runs away.

The thing is, many of us were like him in our adolescent years and a good number of us find it hard to get our life together even sometime after that phase. People who struggled with insecurities and shyness can relate to him: “If I speak up, people may mock me for my ideas; if I don't, people won't even notice I'm here. And after all, do I have strong opinions? Isn’t it better to fit in than to stand out?”. At first, Mob can somehow compensate for his inadequacies by helping other people with his absurd psychic powers. He's been taught by his funny employer that he's as special as people who can run well, study well, sing well, and so on. He takes this view at heart and strongly opposes the possibility of taking advantage of his “special characteristics” to become popular or to make things easier for him.

With these premises, we see Mob grow up and mature. I believe the show is for anyone, as there's this universal empathy that arises when seeing a human being getting rid of negativity and finding light patiently, little by little. Mob couldn't make sense of his feelings unless he reached 100% (of any emotion, be it destructive anger or crippling sadness) and he couldn't hold back anymore. He is naturally gifted with psychic powers that grow stronger the less emotionally stable Mob is; he’s so cool when he gives free rein to destruction, but he feels lonely and empty afterward. This destructive emotional management didn’t take into account growth, because fear paralyzed his right to feel joy or anger at a normal amount. It’s not healthy or sustainable, but he can’t learn how to live with it overnight. Here come some great analogies to help him out: by simply going with the flow and accepting things happen, he gets enrolled in a club and gets to know people. He slowly befriends schoolmates; he starts working out; he inspires people around him with kindness. Friend after friend (1%), jogging after jogging (2%), life-saving exorcism after exorcism (3%). He goes through a constant, invisible progress that it’s there even if it can’t be perceived at first, a percentage after one another just like his emotions piling up. He grows unwillingly confident and this makes him a pleasant guy to pass time with.

We sometimes tend to give importance only to our 0% or 100% states, being those anger, despair, sadness, happiness, well-being, or pride. We tend to ignore the process, the constant level-up that takes us from 2% in feeling okay to a good 42%. Progress takes time but it’s invisible, and it’s so easy to be defeated by the pressure to manage our 100% all the time, even if it exhausts us or lets us empty.

We can do incredible things when we are at our best. We can feel things strongly and understand concepts clearly. But it takes time to adapt to new environments and new abilities, it takes time to see the bigger picture and to appreciate ourselves even when we were at 37%. Mob is a beast when he feels deeply, overcomes obstacle after obstacle, and defeats enemy after enemy. But he can’t be 100% in everything nor this means he is a total failure in other fields. He’s trying, percentage after percentage, to reach a satisfactory point. He might not be 100% in jogging but would like to reach 60% as a personal goal. He might not be a funny person, but people like him a lot even when he’s not at his 100%. He knows that his psychic state at 100% can save people but also destroy things, and he learned how to make sense out of emotions at their “right amount” by relating to days when he just felt so-so or when he didn’t see a direction to take, when the choices he was making were blurry or when singing at a KTV was pleasant even if his singing skills were zero.

I think it’s easier to be said than done, but the fear of feeling intensely should never overcome the joy of dealing with our own emotions. And yet, we are valid both when we feel great and when we feel miserable, when we are balanced or when we lose control. We are human beings, dealing with complex emotions bottled together in our mortal bodies: we can allow ourselves to feel one hundred – of happiness or rage, anxiety or calmness – while also giving credit to our emotions at their zero or fifty. And when we feel like we are at our zero in peacefulness, we should ask for a helping hand even to reach a two, a ten, a twenty, and so on. "Our" people will love us at each percentage we are in. Mob Psycho shows us how to trust the process and the growth and to “feel” multiple emotions all at once. Because that’s what makes us human.