tell your story

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

to give authentic, personal account of one's experience, perspective, and identity — claiming the authority to narrate one's own life rather than allowing it to be defined by others' accounts; telling your story is an act of self-determination and witness that is central to oral history, memoir, testimony, and identity politics; the phrase is used therapeutically to describe the healing value of articulating experience, politically to assert the importance of voices that have been systematically excluded from dominant narratives, and creatively to describe the process by which personal experience becomes the raw material of art and literature