Trying to get rid of the '-2' from category slugs

I’m having an issue where some of the categories I create use a slug and automatically add a ‘-2’ to my slugs even though I didn’t ask it to. After doing a little research, it seems to me that both tags and category slugs use the same exact table in the database: wp-terms. Pretty strange to me and obviously, it’s causing a conflict. So if I want to make a category like ‘wordpress’ how can I make sure it doesn’t do a ‘wordpress-2’ if a tag slug called ‘wordpress’ already exists?