Parallel examples:

• Almost everyone below a certain age plays video/computer games, but only a small subset of those people would self-identify as "gamers."

• You exercise, but do you think of yourself as an "athlete"? You lift weights, but do you think of yourself as a "weightlifter"?

• You are married, but is "spouse" a core part of your identity? You have reproduced, but is "parent" part of your core identity?

"Identifying with" something or "Identifying As" something has an explicit meaning to me, which is that it is something I would call myself. Some of this may come from training and industry I'm in, but it's what you think of yourself as.

For instance, someone who doodles occasionally may or may not identify "as an artist", but anyone who paints professionally almost certainly identifies as an artist. Someone who paints regularly as a hobby probably identifies as an artist; the doodler may be more idle about it and not really think of it as being an essential quality of self: It is something that person does, not something that person is.

I see, I think. It does not seem to be something that I do. For example, I play taiko regularly as a hobby, but if someone asked, "but do you identify as a taiko player", my reaction would be "wuh?"

Going off on a tangent, how fixed or malleable is this mental experience? Has anyone who does "identify with" this or that tried as a meditative exercise, experimentally identifying with other things instead?

For instance, someone who doodles occasionally may or may not identify "as an artist", but anyone who paints professionally almost certainly identifies as an artist.

There are probably plenty of people who paint walls who don't identify as artists.