Writing Squick and Fear
I started thinking about this while critiquing a scary shorty story.

Not scary or squicky to read about.
Thunderstorms.
Ghosts.
Blood & guts.
Villians. They make me mad.

Actually having these happen to me would probably be a different story. Next time I meet Darth Vader on a dark and rainy night, I'll let you know how it went.

Very scary & squicky
Symptom descriptions (especially knee, joint stuff) Sometimes it is called medical student syndrome, when you read about descriptions of symptoms and you feel them youself. Also called sympathetic symptoms. Even a vague description of someone's knee caps being shot makes me want to sit down.

Dealing with strangers is scary, but reading about just strangers isn't as big a deal as reading about someone deal with strangers in the awkward and clunky way that I'm afraid that I would. Some comedies that rely on humiliation as a gag fail on me for that reasons. I've read social anxiety has it's roots in the subsystem of all mammalian brains that make them skittish around others. It makes sense because animals that are universally friendly, including friendly to predators have all been eatten, leaving only those with tendancies to social anxiety.

I can tell you now that when Darth Vader takes insult to my awkward introduction and slices through my knee caps with a light saber, I will be really squicked.