Is meditation compatible with thinking and identity?

I'd really appreciate any personal or critical perspectives here : ) I'm a novice meditator trying to understand it and myself

I don't know much about meditation as other people practice it, but I do know it helps me ground my being and free it of the delusions of excessive thinking.

Sometimes I focus mostly on breath or physical sensations, sometimes it's just a very careful effort while I'm doing things to disidentify with my thoughts and their language. It's a relaxed effort to focus on what is real and what has meaning to me, not words and distant ideas. It's not freedom from my mind but light interaction with it.

It helps me break down my idea of what I'm 'supposed' to be doing, thinking or feeling, and gently put the things I care about in the context of my present being.

I'm torn here. I feel like this 'method' helps me frame my thinking as a very limited way of life and engage with it more healthily. But I also feel I'm still attached to all the ideas I built up. To my sense of self, my ideals, etc. My experiences are my reality. I use meditation to negotiate what I'm experiencing and have experienced. I try to make it as simplistic and free of construction as possible. But is it supposed to show me something completely different? This is what seems realistic to me right now but I want to be open to change if I can.

tldr; meditation helps me with not letting my thinking dominate me, but that seems mundane (if very helpful!) for what's a deep practice with a long history. can it help me in other ways?