"Not" is a short rhyming poem by the Australian poet Erin Hanson about the gap between how we're measured and who we really are. It tells the reader, line by line, that they are not their age, their size, their weight or their hair colour, and then turns to everything they actually are: the books, the words, the private habits and the people they love.
We've all stood in front of a mirror and let a number decide our mood. A dress size, a birthday, the scale on a Monday morning. This poem was written for exactly those moments, which is why it has travelled so far from where it started.
So let's look at who Erin Hanson is, how "Not" works, the strange story of how her poems keep getting credited to other people, and what this one asks of us.
Who is Erin Hanson?
Erin Hanson is a poet from Queensland, Australia, who writes under the name The Poetic Underground. She started writing what she has called "silly little poems" at around 11, and began taking it seriously when she started her blog in 2011. Her short, rhymed poems spread fast online, on Pinterest, Instagram and beyond, often shared as images with only her initials, "e.h."
She has said she is inspired by nature, and by how its patterns, if you watch long enough, start to mirror the patterns and emotions inside a person. What keeps her sharing is simple: people telling her that her words helped them.
Her best-known line comes from a poem she wrote at 18, now printed on posters and passed around social feeds all over the world:
"What if I fall? Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?"
Erin Hanson. In 2023 she spoke to ABC Radio National about how that line went viral and how it has shaped her work since.
She publishes her collections herself, including The Poetic Underground, Voyage, Dreamscape and, most recently, For One Shining Day I Was There, a book of poems written across her twenties and with illustrations by Aimee Hanson.
What "Not" is about
"Not" is a poem of self-acceptance, but it doesn't open with comfort. It opens by taking things away. One by one, it strips off the labels other people use to sum us up: how old we are, what size we wear, what we weigh, the colour of our hair, even our name and the dimples in our cheeks.
Then it turns. Having cleared the ground, the poem fills it with what it says we're really made of. The books we've read and the words we use. Our croaky morning voice. The way we laugh, the things we believe in, the places we've been, the people we love, the future we're hoping for.
And it ends with a gentle sting. The poem suggests that all that beauty was there the whole time. We simply lost sight of it when we started defining ourselves by everything we're not.
We haven't reproduced the poem here, because it belongs to a living poet. You can find Erin Hanson's work on her site, The Poetic Underground, and on her Instagram.
How the poem works
"Not" is built on two lists, and the shape is the whole argument. The first list is made of things that can be measured. The second is made of things that can't. By the time you reach the end, the poem has gently shown you which list is longer and richer.
It's written in rhyming pairs with a steady, sing-song beat, close to a nursery rhyme. That choice is clever. The lightness lets the poem slip past our defences. We don't brace for a lecture, so the message lands.
Notice the details Hanson picks, too. Not "your achievements" or "your values," but a croaky voice first thing in the morning. These are the small, unflattering, private things we'd never put in a profile. The poem insists they count more than anything on a form.
And the title does a lot with three letters. "Not" is the word we usually use against ourselves: not thin enough, not young enough, not enough. Hanson takes it back and points it at the labels instead.
A poet often credited to someone else
Here's a twist that fits this poem almost too well. Because Hanson's poems often circulated online signed only "e.h.," many readers assumed the initials stood for Ernest Hemingway. "Not" in particular has been shared for years, in English and in translation, as a Hemingway poem. It isn't. It's Erin Hanson's.
Her most famous line has had a similar fate. The "what if you fly" line gets pasted onto all kinds of images and passed around without her name, so plenty of people know the words and have no idea a teenage poet in Australia wrote them.
The fix is easy, and it's a kindness. When you share a line you love, take ten seconds to check who wrote it, and name them. For a poem about not being defined by the wrong labels, getting the poet's name right feels like the least we can do.
How to use this poem in your own life
Reading "Not" once feels lovely. Living it takes a bit of practice. Here are a few small ways to start.
- Write your own two lists. On one side, the labels you measure yourself by. On the other, the things you'd want someone to know about you. Look at which list you spend more time on.
- Change one morning habit. If you step on the scale or check the mirror first thing, swap it for something from your second list for a week: a page of a book, a song, a message to someone you love.
- Catch the word "not." Next time you hear yourself say "I'm not enough," finish the sentence the way the poem does: "I'm not that, but I am this."
- Share it with the right name. If the poem helped you, pass it on to someone who needs it, with Erin Hanson's name and a link to her work.
You're allowed to be more than the numbers. You always were.
Where to read more of Erin Hanson
Erin Hanson shares new poems on Instagram as The Poetic Underground. Her books, including For One Shining Day I Was There, are listed on her website, where you can also subscribe to her printed zine, Letters from the Poetic Underground. You can hear her talk about her viral line in her ABC Radio National interview.
The next time a number tries to tell you who you are, remember the second list. That's you. We think it's rather beautiful.
Lifeism shares ideas and practices for reflection. It is not medical, psychological or financial advice. Read our Disclaimer.