Okay, I have serious need of advice from you lovely haired people out there.
First, the backstory.
when i was 12, I dyed my hair burgundy for the first time. Beautiful, but well, I haven't seen this much of my natural color (5-6 inches of new growth)  since.  about  sometime around january 2006 I dyed my hair jet black (I was trying to look  "properly goth") I'd been keeping care of it and it was healthy and shiny, but... then in May I decided I wanted it purple.
Cue cosmetology student/best friend Stephanie, asking if she could do the coloring. Of course, this would involve bleaching out the black, but I trusted her. well, the first bleaching didn't take much color out at all. The second bleaching (on the same day) fried my hair and turned it a strange orange color, with dark brown, blonde and black streaks. Of course, at this point i figured out my poor hair was in no shape to dye that day. So i had to go to school for a week with freakish orange hair. !  well, i managed to get my purple anyway. I dyed it manic panic's purple color twice, about 2 months apart.

Now the purple has faded almost completely except for a few tinges in the dark brown left from bleaching my hair. has anyone else ever seen Manic Panic semipermanent color last almost a year?

Now, I come to my question. The orange has faded to the color in my avatar, but the damage is starting to show really clearly in the last 8 or so inches, and becoming more apparent weekly. My question is, how do I go about getting rid of the damaged areas, without taking off any more length than neccessary? I really don't want short hair again (a "stylist" once hacked it to chin length and it looked horrible!) but I also don't want to be one of those women with really long hair, that is in horrible condition. (Give us long-hairs a bad name, they do!)

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Ditto...you'll have to cut it off to get back to having healthy hair.  Right now your decision is how much to cut off.  1/2 of the damage or (gulp) all of it at once and just start a new.
Its a tough decision most of us have faced at least once.

Its OK-being a longhair and belonging to LongLocks doesn't mean that we never cut or trim our hair.  Sometimes we just gotta do what we gotta do!

It wasn't the semi-permanent purple that damaged the hair... it was the bleaching to GET it to take purple that was the problem, .
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It was, mainly the people I was associating with at the time, and well, I really just love long black hair. *shakes head* my natural color, now that I can finally see it again, is dark enough for me. the black really did look rather stark. gorgeous, but stark. I should have left it that way, rather than damage it so badly with bleach.  Lesson learned. NO MORE CHEMICAL DYES!!  I think I'm going to cut off quite a bit, not all at once though, simply because to get off all the dye damaged hair, I'd have to have a pixie cut. I looked Silly!!