Feminism bites you in the ass if you are resentful.

You can have the consciousness that there must be more equality in the world between the sexes, or less racism, or more tolerance for differences. That can and should be a very good thing. But if this consciousness makes you resentful of every sight or perceived slight, it is going to eat away at you and make you unhappy.

Resentment, like guilt, like envy, seems to make people less than their potential. It is a waste of time. It can often be an excuse for inaction. "I'll never get a fair  shake no matter how hard I try." That attitude is guaranteed to make you feel badly and to lessen your power to make change.

It has to be extremely difficult to keep up the faith in your worth and your abilities when the feedback you get from the world is telling you the opposite. And I am speaking from a highly privileged position. My parents were not prejudiced. They believed in me. "Oh, you'll come out fine, you always do." my mother would say to me. I could have taken it that she was blowing me off or belittling my issue du jour. But she wasn't. She was telling me what she 'knew'.

In his teachings on Buddhism, Lama Marut says that you can and should forgive, but not forget. Forgetting would be stupid. Buddhism also teaches that you can rewrite your past, and it can be a very healthy thing to do. An example of this would be if you had a lousy marriage, and you are now free of it, and you end up thinking about the bad old days, or worse, talking about the bad old days, and you start the litany of all the crap that went on. That might be one way to remember your history. It might feel good for a second to air all the injustices, put the blame where it belongs, feel the power of your resentments. But actually, you are bringing the pain of the past into the present moment and breathing into it new life.

Another way would be to look at your past memories and rest, not in the nightmare, but in the present. The past experiences were all for the good because they contributed to forming the person I am today. They may have given me more compassion for others in difficult situations, relationships. They may have made me better able to understand the suffering of others. But, if you get resentful, you sink. I know this.

Try both ways of looking at some past painful experience and experience your feelings. It is a righteous exercise. Look at your feminism with eyes that see how far we have come and you will see that we have always been here, exactly where we are at the present moment and whatever is holding us back is already over unless you are giving it power by reliving it.