Respectability politics and romance writing: when to care, when not to by adaeze_writes

I have a complicated relationship with the question of whether I should be writing romance. I'm Nigerian, I'm a professional, and I've been told by enough people I respect that romance is a lesser genre that I've had to build a deliberate wall against that opinion. Not because I think it's completely wrong, some romance is badly written, but so is some literary fiction, so is some of everything. The genre itself is not the problem. But the respectability thing runs deep. I still feel it in my body when I tell someone new what I write. There's this moment where I'm waiting for their face to do something. And it does, sometimes. Not always, but enough. What bothers me more than the external judgment is when I catch it in my own head. When I'm writing a scene that's emotionally honest and a part of me says: this is too much, pull back, this is silly. That's the internalized version of the exact same thing. Wonder if other people here deal with this in their own contexts. The writing that you do that someone has told you is beneath you. How do you maintain the conviction that it's worth doing?