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In the spring of 2017, I received a letter from a group called Wellesley Women for Hillary. Thousands of current and former students from my alma mater had worked their hearts out during the campaign. They were crushed by the outcome, but the group stayed together, supporting and encouraging one another. Now they wanted my advice about what to do next.

Around the same time, I got an invitation from Wellesley’s new President, Dr. Paula A. Johnson, to speak at the college’s graduation at the end of May. This would be the third pivotal moment in my life when I addressed a Wellesley graduation. It had been nearly a half century since the first time—at my own graduation in 1969—and doing so again in 2017, in the middle of this long, strange year of regret and resistance, felt fitting. I could try to answer the question posed by the Wellesley Women for Hillary—What do we do now?—for the class of 2017, for our country, and for myself.

I love going back to campus. It’s more built up than it used to be but still beautiful and full of memories: swimming in Lake Waban . . . staying up late arguing about the war and civil rights . . . being told by my French teacher, “Mademoiselle, your talents lie elsewhere” . . . placing a panicked collect call back to Park Ridge because I didn’t think I was smart or sophisticated enough to cut it at Wellesley, and hearing my father say, “Okay, come home,” only to have my mother insist, “There aren’t quitters in our family.”

Over the years, I’ve had a chance to spend time with several generations of Wellesley students, and it’s always a tonic. They’re so smart, engaged, and eager to make their marks on the world. It energizes me, and reminds me of the fire and ambition I felt all those years ago.

In the dizzying, depressing days after my defeat, that’s what I needed. I needed to remember who I was, where I came from, what I believed, and why I fought so hard and so long for it. Wellesley helped me find myself as a young woman. Maybe it could help me again now chart my path.

The second time I spoke at a Wellesley graduation was in 1992, during the heat of Bill’s first run for the White House. I was trying to adjust to the bright glow of the national spotlight (actually, it often felt more like a scorching flame)—and still smarting from the “cookies and tea” fiasco—but also feeling exhilarated by the passion and optimism of our campaign. It was one of the most remarkable years of my life, and I wanted to share what I’d learned and how it felt with my fellow Wellesley grads. In my speech, I urged the class of ’92 to defy the barriers and expectations they still faced as strong, independent women, and focus instead on finding fulfillment in their own unique balance of family, work, and service. I reminded them of Wellesley’s Latin motto, Non Ministrari sed Ministrare, which means “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” That sentiment always appealed to my Methodist sensibilities, and it resonated even more in a year when Bill and I were crisscrossing the country talking about a new birth of responsibility, opportunity, and community.

Since I was speaking at an academic event, I reached for a lofty source of wisdom to give a little oomph to my heartfelt advice about serving others: V?clav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright and activist who had recently become his country’s first freely elected President. Later, as First Lady, I would meet Havel, and he would take me on a mesmerizing moonlit walk through the old city of Prague. But in 1992 I knew him only through his writing, which was eloquent and compelling. Only “by throwing yourself over and over again into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making your voice count—only thus will you really become a person,” he wrote. That’s what I wanted those Wellesley graduates to understand and act on. It was a time of hope and change, and they belonged at the vanguard of a rising generation.

Boy, did 2017 feel different. The hope so many of us felt in 1992 was gone, and in its place was a creeping dread about the future. Every day, the new Trump administration was disgracing our country, undermining the rule of law, and telling such bald-faced lies that it seemed as if it really had no shame at all. (According to the New York Times, Trump lied or dissembled at least once every day for the first 40 days of his presidency. The Washington Post counted 623 false and misleading statements he had made over his first 137 days.)

In 1969, my classmates and I had worried about the loss of trust in our leaders and institutions. Those fears were back at full force, amplified for the internet age, when it’s so easy to live in echo chambers that shut out contrary voices and inconvenient truths. Our leaders now have tools at their disposal to exploit fear, cynicism, and resentment that were unimaginable in 1969.

And as for me, I had thrown myself “into the tumult of the world,” but it had left me bruised and gasping for air. What could I possibly say to the Wellesley class of 2017 in a moment like this?

I thought about Havel. He had persevered through much worse. He and all of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe had lived for decades under what Havel called “a thick crust of lies.” He and other dissidents had managed to punch through those lies and ultimately tear down the authoritarian regimes that propagated them. I went back and reread one of his essays, “The Power of the Powerless,” which explains how individuals can wield truth like a weapon, even when they lack all political influence. Havel understood that authoritarians who rely on lies to control their people are fundamentally not that different from neighborhood bullies. They’re more fragile than they look. He wrote, “The moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked!’—when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game—everything suddenly appears in another light.”

This felt like the right message for 2017. I could warn the Wellesley graduates that they were becoming adults during an all-out assault on truth and reason, especially from a White House specializing in “alternative facts.” I could explain how the administration’s attempts to distort reality were an affront to the Enlightenment values our country was founded on, including the belief that an informed citizenry and free and open debate are the foundations of a healthy democracy. But Havel’s words gave reason to hope. Every one of us has a role to play in defending our democracy and standing up for rational thought. I could remind the graduates of what I’d said in my concession speech: that they are valuable and powerful, and that the skills and values they learned at Wellesley had given them everything they would need to fight back.

It drove me crazy that since the election, pundits had fetishized stereotypical Trump supporters to such a degree that they had started dismissing anyone who lived on the coasts and had a college education as irrelevant and out of touch. I wanted to assure the Wellesley grads that this was nonsense. Their capacity for critical thinking, their commitment to inclusiveness and pluralism, their ethic of serving others—that’s precisely what we needed in America in 2017. My advice would be simple: Don’t let the bastards get you down. Stay true to yourself and your values. Most of all, keep going.