How do I know my thoughts and ideas have value when I come from poverty?

Sor Juana wrote from a position of constraint—she was a woman, Indigenous, without formal institutional power—yet her ideas became central to her era's intellectual life. She didn't wait for permission to think deeply. What she understood was this: your mind doesn't require a credential to be sharp. Your experience doesn't require wealth to be instructive. When you grow up navigating poverty, you develop a kind of intellectual clarity that others sometimes miss—you see how systems actually work, not how they're supposed to work on paper. That's not a deficit. That's evidence. Start writing down your observations about the world around you. Not for anyone else initially—for yourself. Notice what you understand that people with more resources don't. Your thinking is already valuable. The question isn't whether to claim that value, but how to protect it while you develop it further. What's one insight you've had about how the world works that surprised someone from a more privileged background?