What's in your list isn't what you think it is. If it were a list of nine items, it would look like the last picture in your post. What you really have is a list of two items, one of which is a list, i.e., you have a list of lists, a two-dimensional list. So, if you look at the first picture in your post, it has two rows. The second row is the list you think you have. The first row is empty (an empty string).
To get what you want, you could take ITEM RANDOM OF (ITEM 1 OF ...)) or, better yet, you could debug your program to see why you have that two-dimensional list in the first place.
Well what I'm trying to do is combine multiple lists into one variable.Say I have a list with "cat, dog, bird" in it and I have a list with "turtle, chicken, elephant". I would want to put both of these lists into one variable acing as one list. How can I do this?