What Makes the Lump Come in My Throat When I Cry?
The “lump” which comes up into your throat when you cry is caused by a sort of paralysis of the rings of muscles in your throat. The muscles of your throat can make these rings or waves upward also, but it is more difficult upward than downward—probably because of lack of practice, as we say. When you have put something into your stomach that makes you sick and causes you to vomit, the throat muscles take the matter from your stomach and bring it back to the mouth in the same way, except, of course, that this action begins at the bottom.
Sometimes when you cry, or lose control of yourself in some other way (you know, of course, that in crying you always lose control of yourself, don’t you) practically the same effect is produced as when you have something in your stomach that should come out. Crying, or the thing that happens sometimes when we cry, makes the throat muscles act just as if we were vomiting, and as the action is an unnatural one, when the ring or wave reaches the top of the throat, we feel the lump or ball as we call it. We feel the lump because the throat has been made to go through the motion of eliminating something in an unnatural way, just as your arm will hurt if you pretend to have a ball or a stone in it, and in throwing the imaginary ball or stone, you put the same force into your movements as you would if you had an actual ball or stone in your hand and were seeing how far you could throw it.