This is a sad notebook story, though I hope it will have a happy ending soon.

The woman below is Taiya Cornelius, who has filled two notebooks with notes on hundreds of jobs she’s applied for over the past couple of years, none of which she’s gotten.

Taiya Cornelius was always a champion of the spirit, proud proof that unrelenting determination and hard work can triumph over the toughest circumstances.

“When employers ask the dreaded interview question, ‘So tell me about yourself,’ I want to say, ‘Well, it all started back when I was a teenager around the time when crack was an epidemic, and both my parents became addicts. I was not able to finish school because of constant evictions and not having the necessary supplies for school,'” the 40-year-old resident of Harlem said last week.

The Brooklyn welfare hotel where the family lived for a time was bad, but not as bad as the shelter where the residents all slept in a single cavernous room and mothers had to bathe their kids in a sink. Cornelius did not let any of this stop her.

“Instead of becoming a statistic, I earned my GED by age 19, went on to earn an associate’s degree and then my bachelor’s,” said the John Jay College graduate.

She stayed true to what she termed “my mission.”

“To stay gainfully employed and not be a burden on the city and state,” she said….

From the age of 16, she worked at various jobs with growing levels of responsibility, all while raising two children. Eventually, she got her “dream job”… at Bear Stearns.

Then Bear Stearns collapsed, and JP Morgan stepped in. Not even the hardest and ablest workers proved safe, and Cornelius was called into a supervisor’s office.

“They told me due to the economic environment that I would be laid off,” she recalled. “I just got on the train with my boxes. Just came home, just thought about what I was going to do next. I never had a problem finding a job. I had no idea what I was in for.”

She kept a record of each job application, at first so optimistic that she used only one side of a page, but soon she was using the back. She applied for hundreds of positions, with no luck.

“With each passing day and no job prospect in sight, more and more of your dignity is chipped away,” she said….

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After getting to the point where she was forced to apply for food stamps, she did find a job, but it was only a temporary assignment. After 3 months, she was unemployed again.

She resumed the hunt, filling a second notebook. She applied for seven jobs last week, and as of Friday evening had received no response.

“Fridays are kind of hard,” she said. “You think about all the jobs you applied for in the week.”

Her unemployment benefits will run out next month. The child with whom she was pregnant when she trudged through the Blizzard of 2006 to get to work is now 4 and pointing to ads for toys she wants for Christmas.

“I’m ready to mop or whatever at this point,” said the champion of the spirit.”

I may never say this again, but I hope she’ll soon be able to throw those notebooks in the garbage and forget they ever existed.

Read the full story here: Taiya Cornelius, who overcame poverty and the crack epidemic, hits a wall with recent job hunt.