On July 2, 2002, Arwen Mitton woke up in someone else's bed. The room wasn't familiar. The house, at the end of a country road in Littleton, wasn't familiar. Her body wasn't familiar. She screamed.

Almost five years later, Arwen took the podium at the graduation ceremony for the New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord. Chosen to address her fellow graduates, she told a version of her story.

"What happened to me is very complicated," she said into the microphone as a chilly rain fell on a white tent set up for the graduates. "Basically, I went into a coma and remained there for most of my life.

"Less than five years ago, without any warning, I returned. I felt like an alien. I woke up in a strange world, in a strange body that I didn't even know how to use. I couldn't even open my eyes at first because I didn't know how to."

In those five years, Arwen pieced together her past and moved on toward her future. After graduating from NHTI with a 4.0 grade-point-average and a paralegal degree, she was granted several thousand dollars in scholarship money to Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, where she's a junior double majoring in political science and legal studies. This fall, she joined the sailing team.

Arwen was nervous about leaving New Hampshire. She was nervous about making new friends, nervous of what they might think. Her plan always, she says, is to reveal her story slowly.

It's a story about trauma. It's a story about learning to cope, to adjust to bizarre circumstances. It's a story about two lives. It's a story about one life. It's a story about gender and sex. It's a story about bellying up to the unknown, about courage and perseverance. Sometimes, it's a story about loneliness.

Mostly, it's not what you think.

And while it's easy to become fixated on one detail or another, to understand Arwen, you have to understand her whole story - the entire thing. That understanding is something she both yearns for and fears.

Living with a secret

Arwen is tall and thin, and grabs her elbows and swings her feet when she talks. She has a strong jaw and often pulls her strawberry blonde hair into a ponytail. Her voice is smooth and her lips pursed.

Arwen didn't always look like this. For nearly 50 years, she looked like Randy Mitton, a muscular 175-pound construction worker. The third of seven children, Randy grew up in northern New Hampshire and loved the outdoors. He also loved his wife, Wendy Kern.

The two met in Franconia in 1984. A special education teacher, Wendy was spending the summer working at the hiker information booth in Franconia Notch. Randy was hiking through.

They were married in the fall of 1985. In 1990, Randy custom-built a house for them to live in at the end of a pastoral gravel road in Littleton. He'd always dreamed of being an architect and drew the plans for the house, in the shape of half an octagon, by hand.

The couple spent their time cross-country skiing, sailing and hiking. They were happy.

But they had a secret. Six years before Randy met Wendy, in 1978, he fell while doing trail maintenance at the steep Flume Gorge in Franconia Notch. For years after, he suffered from debilitating headaches. The headaches would knock him out, so much that he'd stay in bed for hours.

When he was in the throes of one of his headaches, he'd speak in different female voices. He'd pass out and wake up as someone else. Sometimes it was Melissa. Or Linda. Or Angela. Or 5-year-old Susie.

Susie was the helper. While the others showed up and wanted to go shopping or dancing, or wanted to have sex, Susie talked to Wendy and explained what was

happening. She said there was a big house with many rooms in Randy's head and each room was home to a different person. The different people liked to come out, she said. And if they knocked hard enough on the inside of Randy's head, they could.

Then, once they were satisfied, they'd disappear almost as quickly as they'd come. Randy would snap back, startled as if he'd been shaken awake, and his headache would be gone.

Randy knew about the voices, and they worried him. He knew other people came out when he was asleep, he knew they wanted to dress up in women's clothes. Sometimes, he'd wake up to find one of them had shaven his legs. Every so often, he'd tell Wendy he had "girl feelings" he couldn't explain.

But he refused to see a doctor. So Wendy tried to help. Susie said that it helped Randy to have the other people come out when he had a headache; she said it gave him a break "from being a person." In an effort to appease Melissa, Linda, Angela and the others, Wendy bought women's clothes, big enough to fit Randy's tall, masculine frame, at a secondhand store for them to wear.

"It was fascinating," Wendy said of the voices, "but definitely unsettling. But by then, I was in love with Randy and married to him. He did not want anyone to know, and living with that secret was not too hard at first because (the voices) didn't happen much. But then it started to happen more."

Arwen appears

In 1992, Randy fell while downhill skiing and broke his right shoulder. He couldn't work construction while he healed and he felt guilty about not earning money. Faced with a tanking economy and a slow building industry, Randy looked for work in another field.

A visual thinker who was good with computers, he was hired by a cartographer. Randy attended night classes on mapping and eventually worked his way up in the company. He loved his work.

Then, in January 2002, Randy was fired without warning.

He fell into a funk. He became reclusive, sluggish and depressed. At first Wendy thought Randy was down about losing his job. By March, she thought differently.

Arwen showed up in early 2002, one of the regular cast of people who came out when Randy had his headaches. But she soon became the dominant person, coming out more and more.

Wendy sensed a transition was under way.

She refers to the period between March and July 2002 as Arwen and Randy's "shared time." Every day, she'd wake Randy before she went off to her job as a special educator and make sure he got in the shower. Then Randy would eat and head straight to the computer, where he'd stay for hours.

He'd play games and chat online as Arwen, a young woman in her early 20s. Sometimes, when Wendy would come home and ask Randy what he wanted for dinner, Arwen would answer. Wendy kept her cool. "Oh, is that you, Arwen?" she would say.

By June 2002, Randy looked wiped out. His eyes were sunken, his complexion was dull. He looked to Wendy like he was deflating. Wendy tried not to see it; she didn't want to believe anything was wrong.

One weekend, Wendy and Randy traveled to New Jersey for back-to-back family weddings. On the drive home, Randy "seemed to be hanging on by a thread," Wendy said.

"He said, 'What would you think if Arwen started to spend more time out and I spent less?' " Wendy said.

"And I thought, if that's what you need, let's try it. So I said, 'Let's give it a shot,' probably thinking we'd do this for a while and he'd get stronger."

But that's not what happened.

"I woke up the next morning and Arwen was here and Randy was gone," she said. "I think he held on for as long as he did for me."

That's when Arwen's memory of what she calls "here" starts. It starts with her screaming.

A simpler world

Arwen thought it was a dream. The unfamiliar bed. The oddly shaped house. The man's body.

She wanted nothing more than to go home.

At that point, home was where Arwen had lived for 22 years: inside, in a place of her own creation. She didn't know that her inside world wasn't real, that the people there weren't made of flesh and blood.

Inside, Arwen was born in 1980, her parents' second child. Their first, Randy, was already in college. When Arwen was 2 or 3 years old, her parents died in a car accident and she went to live with her brother. A few years later, Randy married a nice woman named Wendy, who raised Arwen as her own.

The three of them lived in Littleton in a rectangular house with three bedrooms and an office. But the Littleton she grew up in doesn't look like the real Littleton. Inside, she said, things were simpler.

There were only 16 colors and everything was dull. There was pain, but she never bled. There were cars and computers, but they never broke down. There were no sunburns. There were no insects.

They had candy and soda, but no brand names. There was TV but only three channels, and there were fewer books at the library. There was no rap or country music. Food had a totally different texture and taste. Birthdays weren't a big deal. There was no abortion. She had no sense of smell.

"Maybe my world was more like the 1950s," she said. "It was more innocent."

Inside, Arwen lived a fairly normal life. She was a bubbly blond cheerleader who went to school, got her driver's license, wore a dress to her junior prom. She said she was a "social butterfly," a blast at concerts, a lover of photography.

Her world was sheltered, but she didn't mind. She knew that black and Hispanic people existed but had never met any. She knew that the big city of Boston was nearby but had never been there. She knew there were wars but didn't know anyone in the military. She knew of evil but rarely encountered it.

She also never encountered teenage love, though she came close.

"I've never been good with relationships," Arwen said one day last summer. "I was really close to being in love on the inside. That's hard; its not easy. I haven't been able to do that out here."

Love remains one of Arwen's biggest wishes and greatest fears.

"I would like to be in a relationship," she said. "My biggest worry is that I'll go through life not knowing what love is."

Voices silenced

Arwen refers to herself as a "returning original personality." It's a term that's not widely recognized, even in the mental health community, and there are very few known cases. Basically, it means Arwen was not imagined by Randy - but the other way around.

It's closest cousin is dissociative identity disorder, once known as multiple personality disorder. A person with DID has several alter personalities besides his own. Each alter controls the person's behavior at times; often, the person can't remember what happened when the alters were in control.

Psychiatrists believe DID starts during childhood as a defense mechanism. Abused children learn to dissociate, or separate their minds from their bodies so it seems the abuse is not happening to them. They create alter personalities. Eventually, the alters take up residence, coming out when needed.

The ideal is to integrate all the alters, who are often different ages and genders, back into the original personality. It's a process that can take years of intensive therapy. Each alter was created to deal with a specific trauma, and working through each one to achieve harmony can be a daunting task.

If Randy had seen a doctor, he likely would have been diagnosed with DID. Melissa, Linda, Angela and Susie were some of his alters.

There's also another part of the DID diagnosis that doesn't fit: Arwen says she was never abused.

Instead, she believes that when she was 2 or 3, she realized she was a girl in a boy's body. Unable to deal with that, her female personality retreated inside. A new personality emerged: a boy who would build his own sailboats out of rowboats and bed sheets, and who would grow up to become a construction worker.

It's not the clearest explanation, but it's the best Arwen has.

"It's not solid, but it's sound," Arwen says often. "You can't prove it, but if you take all the pieces and you put them together, they support themselves."

In the days after Arwen came to stay, Susie returned a few times to say goodbye. She told Wendy, "Randy's a tiny little baby now. Don't try to get him back." Wendy pleaded with her, asking if there was anything Susie could do. But Susie said no. "Randy's getting smaller and smaller," she said.

The last time Susie came, she told Wendy that Arwen didn't need her like Randy did. Then she too disappeared.

Puzzle pieces

On Feb. 10, 2004, Arwen had sexual reassignment surgery at a hospital in Montreal.

Arwen doesn't like to mention her surgery. To her, it was a necessity, a step toward normalcy. She's different from most transsexuals because she doesn't remember ever living as a male; inside she was a female. When Wendy first brought her to a doctor, Arwen spoke constantly of being "fixed."

Dressed in Randy's clothes, Arwen saw her first psychologist during summer 2002: Dr. Jeffery Kay, a Littleton psychologist who specializes in dissociative disorders.

"I approached Arwen as a typical DID," Kay said, "and gradually came to see that she was not."

But it wasn't immediately apparent. In the beginning, even Kay believed Arwen was herself an alter, one of Randy's female personalities come to stay for a bit. The doctors asked Arwen questions about Randy, tried to coax him back.

The doctors treated her as if she were part of the problem, not the person having the problem.

"The doctors were trying to reach Randy and to get me back where I came from," Arwen said. "The thing that made this click for me was that Dr. Allison said, 'You need to figure out who the original personality was.' We all thought Randy was the original. Then I thought, what if I was the first one?"

Dr. Allison is Dr. Ralph Allison, a retired forensic psychiatrist from California. He's worked with people with dissociative disorders since the early 1970s, and he runs a website called dissociation.com. That's where Arwen found him.

When Allison talks about dissociation, he talks about "essence," "thought-space" and "alternate worlds." Allison says he's ahead of his time. Other psychiatrists say he's wrong, even crazy.

He believes that if brutal parents have a child who is highly susceptible to hypnosis - which he said is rare since only 4 percent of the population is hypnotizable - and those parents try to kill the child before age 6, the child's "essence" can dissociate from its body. He believes the essence, or original personality, goes to live in a place he calls the thought-space, where it's protected.

It's an extreme defense mechanism, Allison said, more extreme than DID. Unlike DID, where the original personality rotates in and out, sharing space with the alters, people whose personalities retreat to the thought-space can remain there for decades, only returning when they feel it's safe.

Allison's most-studied example is a patient known as Marie McKenzie. Born to disturbed parents, Marie's mother tried to kill her when she was a baby. So Marie left and didn't come back for 30 years.

"When her mother aimed a knife at her to cut her up into mincemeat, the original personality was sent off to another space," Allison said. "Then the essence made the first alter, and that was a little baby that did not demand anything of mother - don't feed me, don't wipe my diapers, I'll just be a sweet girl so you won't kill me - whereas the first personality was demanding and spunky and would have gotten killed."

Allison's theories explain most of Arwen's experiences. What he calls the "essence," she calls her "original personality." The "thought-space" is Arwen's "inside," a safe place where she learned basic skills that helped her survive when she returned. The one thing that doesn't fit is the reason for retreat.

Arwen doesn't believe anyone ever tried to kill her. What she believes is that her gender confusion was so shocking to her as a small child that she could have, at age 2 or 3, thought her life was in danger. But she admits there's no way of knowing for sure - and she's not too bothered by it.

"There's exceptions to the rule for everything," she said. "The criteria might work 99 percent of the time, but there will always be that something or someone who doesn't fit. I don't care about credibility. I care about understanding."

New struggles

But Arwen is the first to admit that it's hard to find friends - or lovers - who feel the same way.

For the first few years, Arwen was mostly alone. She had Wendy, who became like a mother to her, and Wendy's family, who were equally as accepting. But her own family struggled. The first Christmas she was here, Arwen wrote them a letter asking for forgiveness and acceptance. Today, some of them accept her more than others.

Arwen and Wendy struggled, too. Wendy grappled with the loss of her husband and with how to care for Arwen. "I felt like overnight, I went from being a wife to becoming the single parent of a disabled adult," she said. Wendy debated how to tell her friends that Randy was now a 22-year-old woman.

"Throughout the first year, some of my friends were supportive of me but not of Arwen," Wendy said. "You really find out where people's hearts and minds are."

Meanwhile, Arwen battled feelings of guilt. "I came out and destroyed a relationship," Arwen said, referring to Randy's marriage with Wendy. "I feel like I killed a person, and it's horrible because it wasn't intentional. I didn't want to wreck anybody . . . but that's what I did, and I struggle with that."

Arwen struggled with much more, as well. The first few months, she cried constantly. She didn't understand how to walk, how to shower, how to brush her teeth. She didn't understand why there were so many shades of green outside, why food tasted different. She didn't understand why her body wasn't her own. Sometimes she would get so upset, she'd stop breathing and Wendy would have to call 911.

"I went through hell the first few months," Arwen said. "I almost shut down. I tried really hard to go back (inside). . . . I hoped and wished and prayed for it (but) I just made my head hurt."

There were also legal issues to contend with. For starters, Wendy and Arwen had to get a formal divorce. (They joke that, for a while, they were the only two women legally married in New Hampshire.) And Arwen had to have the name on her birth certificate changed.

Eventually, as acceptance and understanding came, so did Arwen's desire to get a job. But it was almost impossible. She tried to find work but had trouble explaining her total lack of job history and education to job placement agencies.

"I'd call them up and tell them about what I was dealing with in a brief way and there would be silence on the other end," she said. After several failed attempts, her doctors suggested she try college.

A study in perseverance

Arwen had no idea if she could handle college. Take baby steps, her doctors told her, so she enrolled in a summer course at NHTI in June 2005. She chose psychology because she figured she'd seen enough psychologists to qualify. Twice a week, she drove an hour and a half to Concord for class.

Arwen immediately ran head-on into the types of challenges that would make school tough. Having lived nearly all her life inside, Arwen had a huge gap in cultural knowledge: She didn't know what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, and she'd never heard of The Wizard of Oz.

In one psychology class, the teacher gave the students a memory test. The teacher asked all nine students to list as many of the seven dwarves as they could. Arwen couldn't list any.

"I would have to Google stuff, like O.J. Simpson," she said. "So I was learning background at the same time I was learning the curriculum. . . . College got easier as I filled in the blanks."

Her first year at NHTI was lonely. She lived in North Hall, one of the dorms on campus, with 140 other students mostly in their teens and 20s. She lived in a single room in a hallway with only one other person, who wasn't a student but an AmeriCorps volunteer. The only thing she shared was a bathroom.

In an attempt to make friends, she joined the hall council, helping to plan barbecues and dorm-wide trips, and kept her door propped open. But still, nobody ever invited her to lunch.

Meanwhile, Arwen threw herself into her studies. She read every word in her textbooks and took meticulous notes. She asked reams of questions. She never shrank from expressing her opinion. And to her surprise - and the surprise of those who met her on her first day of school - she got straight A's.

"When I first met Arwen, I said, 'Okay, let's see how this one will work out,' " said Stacey Peters, head of the paralegal department. But, she said, "Arwen didn't embrace (school), she bear-hugged it. She was open to everything and anything. People really respected her. . . . Everybody knew Arwen was the No. 1 grade getter, (and) they wanted to study with Arwen, know what Arwen thought."

Ginger McLeod, who served with Arwen on the student senate, doesn't remember acceptance of Arwen coming quite so easily. At first, she said, Arwen made people on campus uncomfortable.

"There was buzz on campus of, 'Oh my God, did you see?' " McLeod said.

But Arwen didn't hide. Just the opposite; she joined the volleyball team, became secretary of the student senate and was inducted into Phi Theta Kappa, an honors society for two-year colleges. Her second year on campus, Arwen moved into a dorm room in the middle of a crowded wing. She made friends and shared breakfasts, dinners and birthdays. She no longer ate alone.

Over time, she won more and more people's hearts.

"Even those little kids who were like, 'eeeew,' Arwen made it easy to see past what people were afraid of," McLeod said. "She was determined to be a part of that community, and she didn't take it on like a bull. She just stood up and held her head up and she just did what she did. People would take a deep breath and go, 'Oh, God,' but by the time she left that school, she owned it."

One of the people who became invested in Arwen was Beth Blankenstein, the associate vice president of academic affairs and the Phi Theta Kappa adviser. Blankenstein watched Arwen blossom from a woman with no preconceived notions of how she'd do in school to the college's first State House intern. When Arwen announced that she'd like to continue at Roger Williams, Blankenstein helped her find scholarship money.

"She's known tremendous defeat, but she has no fear of risk," Blankenstein said of Arwen. "I don't see her failing at anything."

Survival skills

Arwen's forecast for her future is a bit more tempered. "I just want to survive at this point. I just want to get through life here. I don't know if I'll ever be happy here. I've had to make so many concessions . . ." Arwen said one day last spring, her voice trailing off.

Halfway through her first year at Roger Williams, Arwen is growing. Living nearly four hours from Littleton, she's more independent than she's ever been. She's also lonelier.

Arwen lives off campus, in an old hotel the school has converted into a dorm. She describes it as "solitary confinement." She has a twin bed, a bathroom and a two-burner stove. To save money, she prepares and eats most of her meals in her room. It's against building code for her to prop her door open.

She's busy with her classes, in which she earned straight A's her first semester, but she also craves socialization. Usually gregarious and outgoing, Arwen said it's harder for her to make friends at Roger Williams than it was at NHTI because the students are so much younger. And even though Arwen feels like she's 27, she looks older. Most people assume she is.

"I just try to blend in," Arwen said. "I just don't want to stand out more than I usually do."

Partly to make friends, Arwen tried out for the sailing team - and made it. Since September, she's awoken before dawn to work out with her teammates, who are all in their teens and 20s. And until November, she was heading onto the water for three hours in the afternoon to learn the basics of sailing: lean to starboard, lean to port, duck under the boom, brace yourself against the waves.

At first, she said, "I felt like I was on an Olympic team or something. It's all these young, tanned, good-looking - mostly - guys and girls who look like they came straight off some California beach.

"I felt like, 'Oh God, well at least I can learn to sail a little bit for a couple weeks before they kick me off the team.' "

But they haven't, and Arwen has become more and more committed to the sport. This past fall, she competed in two regattas against schools like Dartmouth, Yale and the University of Vermont. Over Christmas break, she bought a $600 dry suit - a must if she wants to get back on the water this month.

Still, friends haven't come easily. Her teammates include her in team activities but not much else. She has a few other friends, but she's so busy that she rarely sees them. Arwen misses visiting her best friend Wendy and Wendy's boyfriend in Littleton on weekends. She misses laughing over dinner.

Sometimes she gets so lonely she lies in bed, hugs her teddy bear and cries. Sometimes she yells at God. She agreed to let the Monitor tell her story with the hope it might help someone, somewhere.

But even though Arwen feels down sometimes, she always pulls herself back up, always reminds herself she has a lot to be thankful for. She's surviving. She's succeeding. She's looking ahead. After graduation, she hopes to become an advocate for either the environment or people with disabilities.

"I don't understand why this happened to me," Arwen said. "I'm trying to figure out why. I feel like there's a purpose here somewhere . . . and I wonder how I can use the gifts I have.

"In the Bible, it says God never gives you more than you can handle," she said. "I've had a lot of trials, but he's always given me ways to get through them. . . . There's angels out there."

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By MELANIE ASMAR