RECOVERY WORKS Bruce Curran “I finally have a sense of who I am.”

Editor’s note: September is National Drug and Alcohol Addiction Recovery Month. To celebrate the success of treatment and recovery programs, and to inspire people struggling with substance abuse and addiction, a dozen Mainers have agreed to share their personal stories. “Recovery Works” will feature these profiles each Thursday in the Well-Being section, replacing the “Finding a Fix” column through September.

A bartender set Bruce Curran on the road to sobriety in 1987, arranging for him to be picked up at the American Legion Hall bar in Sanford and taken to the veterans medical center in Togus.

“I was ready to go,” Bruce said, though it had taken 20 years, a nerve-wracking stint in Vietnam, a failed marriage and a major hit to his career in the air freight industry before the light came on. “When I checked in at Togus, I weighed 140 pounds,” the 6-foot-4-inch man recalled. “I had basically been living on alcohol.”

The Togus program allowed him to start rebuilding his physical health, provided him with solid information about the disease of alcoholism and introduced him to the far-reaching safety net of Alcoholics Anonymous. Nearly 20 years later, Bruce still attends one or two AA meetings a week and has a sponsor he meets with regularly.

“The best thing about recovery is that I finally have a sense of who I am, and I’ve figured out that I can do what I want in life without worrying about what other people think I should be doing,” he said. Since 1990, Bruce has worked as a substance abuse counselor in northern Maine, first at the residential treatment program in Limestone known locally as The Farm, and more recently at the Mountain View Youth Development Center in Charleston.

He’s also on a crusade to de-stigmatize the disease of addiction and spread the good news of recovery.

“Too often, the people who are successful in recovery just disappear,” he said, “and we never get to hear how their lives have turned out.”