Billy Porter Talks Self-Care and Decluttering Your Mind

By D'Shonda Brown ·April 15, 2021April 15, 2021

Have you ever heard the saying, “your living space is a reflection of your current state of mind”? If that’s the case, then what does your room, apartment, or house say about you? Are you an organized whiz-kid or are you sporadic and spontaneous like the clothes laid all over your living room? Either way,Clorox® Scentiva®, and Billy Porter have partnered together to give you the scented solution you’ve been needing to declutter your mind and your room.

Clorox® Scentiva® has launched the YAS CLEAN! Program, which helps you to stop cleaning and start queening. Now through June 30, participants can enter for a chance to win $5,000 for your dream home makeover, plus $5,000 toward a charity of your choice.

“This COVID time has really centered me inside of my own journey towards healing, past trauma, and grief. I’m grateful to have had the time – even though it was forced – to sit down and shut up and take care of myself,” Porter told ESSENCE about his mental health during the pandemic and how he has utilized his time, which led him to discuss the Clorox® Scentiva® campaign. “The whole point of the partnership that I’m doing with Clorox Scentiva is to help the world re-imagine their cleaning routine as a means of self-care, as opposed to it being a chore. I didn’t even know what self-care meant until recently.”

@theebillyporter

Join me in the #YasClean challenge & visit YasClean.com to enter to win $5K with #CloroxScentiva #ad

♬ YAS CLEAN! – Clorox Scentiva feat. Billy Porter

Billy Porter sat down for a virtual chat with ESSENCE about the #YasClean Sweepstakes, the importance of decluttering your mind and physical space for mental health maintenance, and saying goodbye to FX’s Pose.

How is Clorox Scentiva really helping you indulge in self-care and what does a clean, happy home space do for your mental wellness?

PORTER: A long time ago, I realized, and we have a lot of decluttering shows that show a lot of organizing things. One of the principles is, when you organize and clean your personal space, you declutter and clean your mind. Hopefully, it generates an energy, a forward motion, expansive energy in your home.

This isn’t no lie, I didn’t know about Clorox Scentiva before we started working together and in this last year, with all of this COVID-19 and all of this mess, this partnership came in handy because I used the product and I use it every single day. The smells are transformative and they really linger and last and kind of can really be can really transport you to, to feeling like you’re in another space, whether it’s the Tahitian Grapefruit Splash or whether it’s the Pacific Breeze and Coconut. It really, it really has opened me up and calmed me down, and soothed my spirit in many, many ways.

Talk about the #YesClean Sweepstakes and how we can win $5,000 for ourselves and $5,000 for charity.

PORTER: Clorox Scentiva and I are helping homes across the country go from drab to fab. You can go online to yesclean.com to enter the sweepstakes, and you get a chance to win $5,000 for your dream home makeover, but also for a charity of your choice. I think that is the pay it forward part that really was a determining factor for me inside of the partnership. Nobody can do this alone. Nobody can get through this life alone. We do not do it alone. It’s a special campaign for me in that sense. I’m always down for the charity part.

Why is self-care so important as a Black male in this sociopolitical climate and a multi-hyphenate in this space?

PORTER: Self-care allows for me to turn my rage into action. Rage can either be an engine or it could be destruction. Rage without the self-care component is destruction. With it, it becomes action, and that’s what I’m trying to do. That’s why I’ve leaned so far into it through this time specifically, through these last four years, five years, but also specifically within the last year of COVID. It’s been a really special time for me to begin to understand how to move through the rest of my life. How I plan to engage in the rest of my life because eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and the fight continues.

What are your feelings about this final season of Pose?

PORTER: It is bittersweet. I have to say that being blessed to go back to the set after seven months of quarantine, with all of the COVID restrictions. The Clorox Scentiva product was put to use in the new protocols on set. With that said, I feel so blessed to have lived long enough to see the day where the story of Pose and the people who populated are centered and honored. I’m a 51-year-old, Black queer man who lived through a plague. I survived it.

We came to 1996, the antiretroviral drugs came out and we were forgotten. Pose brings all of those people back to life. An entire generation has been brought back to life to remind the world that we were here, we have always been here and we’re not ever going anywhere. It’s powerful the shoulders on which I stand. The legacy of the generation of people who I get to represent, who we all get to represent in this story in Pose, it’s important, it’s necessary. Like Kamala Harris says, “We may be the first, but we most definitely will not be the last”. And I am honored and humbled to be a part of that conversation.

What advice do you have for anybody struggling to declutter their minds and really tap into self-love and self-care, and really try to implement balance into their life?

PORTER: My advice would be to continue down the path, no matter what it takes – and it’s not an easy one. It’s not a quick one. Be compassionate with yourself. Learn how to love yourself, and do it, do it, do it, do it. It will change your life.