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Mildy Medicated

2025-06-03

A Website I Coded Instead of Crying


What is Mildly Medicated?

Mildly Medicated is a satirical wellness brand disguised as a soft, aesthetically-pleasing e-commerce site. It’s fake. It’s functional. It’s emotionally supportive in the weirdest way. Built as a parody of mental health marketing and self-care consumerism, the site sells imaginary products to help you feel mildly okay. There’s no actual checkout, just a delayed popup that gently reminds you you’re not alone (and maybe need water).


Think:


Project Duration

16 days total Started as a spontaneous burnout-fueled Figma draft → paused for work → resurrected with 3AM coding energy and deployed under spiritual pressure. From meme to live site in just over two weeks (with breaks for spirals and surviving the day job).


Tech & Tools


My Role

I did it all….





The Entry Lore

To be honest, it started because I was tired of corporate bullshit.
One day, in the middle of yet another soul-draining work spiral, I made a meme:

Anti-Bullshit Pills.

For emotional support, and also maybe revenge. At the time, I was fully burnt out, cleaning up after every team oopsie like the designated crew janitor, all while carrying everyone’s mental load like some unlicensed therapist.


I was done. But I was also still a creative. So I did what I do best: made fake ads instead of confronting my feelings.


I showed one of them to my mentor and said,

“Hey look. I made this cursed thing lol.”

And he said,

“Why don’t you make a website for it? Didn’t you say you wanted to learn HTML?”

I said,

“Maybe… later?”


LMAO. 2 hours later:


Now it’s real..Kinda.


It doesn’t sell anything, but it weirdly made me feel better. So… welcome to Mildly Medicated: A fake wellness site built by a real person losing it.


The Process

After I finished screaming “SHHHHHIIIIIIII—” at my Figma hi-fi mockups, I sent them to my mentor like “look what I did lol.” Later that night, he called me and gave me a crash course in dev basics: how to build an HTML skeleton, how to attach CSS, and then slapped me with a W3Schools link like it was a sacred scroll. Everything was fast, messy, and chaotic, but it sounds fun. The next morning, at around 3AM (because of course), the coding possession kicked in. If you’ve read my CHEEHOO case study, you’ll know this is a recurring spiritual phenomenon. I opened up VS Code, started typing based on what I remembered from the call, and reread the W3Schools documentation like I was decoding prophecy.


Then suddenly, this realisation hit:

CSS is literally just Figma, but with more words.

And from that moment on, it all just… clicked. I didn’t struggle. I didn’t hate it. In fact, I loved it more than bot coding, because with frontend, I could see the changes happen instantly. No more writing 20 lines of logic just to hope one function fires in Discord. No more wrapping every command in five layers of catch(err).


Just code → refresh → result. It felt alive.


And so I entered my frontend flow state. I coded the entire homepage in one day, riding the high of aesthetic hover states and emotionally unstable buttons. No frameworks. No templates. Just vibes, pixels, and emotional damage turned into design.


What I Was Trying to Do (a.k.a. Problem-Solving, But Make It Personal)

I didn’t want to just build another pretty site that feels the same as every other “aesthetic” project out there. Even though I knew I was limited—this was my first time really touching HTML/CSS—I still wanted it to feel different. Before this, I was already a visual storyteller, a UI/UX designer, and a walking meme factory.


So the question that kept looping in my brain was:

How can this feel real? How can I make it believable, with the little I know?


I couldn’t do advanced CSS magic (yet), but I did sneak in some ✨neumorphic buttons✨, because if it’s gonna click, it better jiggle pretty.


I focused on building a flow:


I curated each hero image to look polished and serious, then paired it with completely chaotic headlines. I used everything I knew, colour theory, visual hierarchy, pacing. To make sure nothing felt boring, overwhelming, or like a rushed school project. Every detail was designed with intention.


And maybe because I built bots before, I already had that “what if user…” mindset:


I didn’t have fancy libraries. But I had emotional UX, and that felt more powerful. 5 days later, it was done. I sent it to my mentor. I was so proud.


But then… the biggest problem was waiting for me.


God Gives His Toughest Viewports to His Most Sleep-Deprived Soldiers

But then the time came. My mentor casually asked,

“So… you wanna deploy it now?”

And I was like,

“Uh not yet, still polishing.”

Then he hit me with the deadliest follow-up:

“Did you make it responsive?”

KABOOOOOOOM.


No. Of course I didn’t. How did I forget that?? I had thought about everything—flow, layout, hover states, emotional UX, button behaviours, even DNS—but I completely forgot mobile users exist. To be fair… this whole project had zero planning. It was born out of burnout, built during 3AM possessions, and just kept spiraling into a fully-coded mental support center. It wasn’t supposed to exist. It just did. Like a surprise parasite in your brain going “tadaaa, I’m your problem now.” My mentor emergency deployed it on his server so we could preview it live.


We both screamed laughing at how broken it looked on mobile. And then flexed it to our friends like:

“Look at this new CSS goddess who just dropped the most abstract site of 2025.”

Was I sad?
Hell no.


I read every documentation link I could find. I had an existential crisis over flexbox before breakfast. And then I manifested a vision where I actually fix this.


OMG media query is a thing

My lovely mentor didn’t give me a tutorial. He just gave me a hint:

“Find out about media queries. See what’s there. Apply. Implement. I want to see how much you understand things.”

So once again, with no scaffolding, I dove headfirst into documentation. I scraped W3Schools, MDN, random codepens, anything I could find. And somehow… I think I fixed it. But I also didn’t.
Not really.


I fixed it without fixing it.

I hardcoded margin: -300px;

I shoved in <br/> tags mid-sentence to space my word salad just right on desktop, only to realize it murdered mobile. I accepted every suspicious flexbox suggestion VSCode gave me like a desperate deal with the devil. I tested everything that looked “fine” and slapped it into the stylesheet with hope and prayer.


The result? A bloated mess of a codebase. Unscalable. Unhinged. But visually? Kinda fire.


Because at that point, my mindset was:

If it works, it works. If it looks good, it’s good. Even if I hardcoded every breakpoint. Even if I broke a hundred best practices. All I wanted was for someone to open the site and feel something. To scroll through and go “wait… this is actually kinda nice,” not “why is everything broken?”


Was it illegal code? Maybe.


Was it worth it? Absolutely.


I made a promise to myself to learn better practices next time.


But right then, all I could hear was the temptation to deploy—because my mentor mentioned it once, and my friends wouldn’t stop asking:

“Is it done yet?”
“Can we see it?”

And honestly?

I kinda wanted to see it live too.


Secret Mission Disguised as a Meme and Coding Learning

While I was building this site, I kept wondering… what if it’s more than just a funny fake shop? I wanted it to be comforting. Not just weird. Not just pretty. But real, in its own strange way. Something someone could stumble into and feel a little less alone. That’s when I added one last page. Quietly. No jokes. No fake pills. Just honesty.


I wrote a short note about mental health, how important it is, and why seeking help is okay. For the first time ever, I opened up publicly. I wrote that I’m on medication. That my brain is half-functioning most days. That even like this, I still wanted to help. Still wanted to create something for someone else to hold onto.


Not oversharing. Just enough to say:

Hey. I’m broken too. And I still made something. You can, too.


And at the bottom of that page, I linked to befrienders.org, in case anyone, anywhere, ever landed on my site in a moment of crisis. Because if even one person finds this while searching for a reason to stay, and they click that link,and they get help… then it’s all worth it. This wasn’t just a coding practice. It was a secret mission in plain sight. A soft-coded lifeline. Disguised as a meme.


Bottom Line

Mildly Medicated started as a meme. A fake ad. A tired joke. A personal outlet. But somewhere between Figma and deployment, it became something else— a place where I could be real, experimental, messy, emotional, and still build something I was proud of.


This wasn’t perfect code.
It wasn’t best practice.
It was survival.
It was healing.


It was learning in public with my hands shaking and my tabs overflowing. If you’re here, reading this, wondering if you can make something too!! You can. Even if it’s weird. Even if it’s fake. Even if you’re mildly medicated.


Because the point isn’t perfection. It’s that you’re still here.


Still trying.


Still building.


That’s more than enough.





If you’re here at the bottom, I see you.
You’re not alone. Also, maybe go drink water..
Either way, thank you for reading!!



→ enter the soft-coded lifeline disguised as a meme

P.S. The site isn’t perfect. It’s still slightly broken on some screens. And honestly? I don’t plan on fixing it. Because this version? the messy one, the hardcoded one, the “look good first, cry later” one is a reflection of where I was when I built it. This is my milestone. My glitchy little time capsule. And that’s enough for me.

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