Transactions should be short lived, they block data on the database side from acessing those tables or rows. Best to not jole onto a transaction that long and instead gather your data first or rethink your access patterns to your data base.
But arc does give you a try_unwrap which returns the inner type if there is only one strong copy left. And mutex gives you an into_inner to move out of it. But really transactions should not be held for a long period of time.
This is stupid advice. If you want to learn rust then learn rust.
In that time you are no closer to learning rust. If you started with rust you would know it by now. Rust is not harder to learn then C. If anything C is harder to learn as it's compiler doesn't guide you at all.
You don't need to learn C to appreciate the borrow checker. I find beginners just accept whatever they are first taught. It is only really those that come from C the put up a bigger fight when learning rust.
And 6 months in a language without a borrow checker is not really long enough to learn the reasons why a borrow checker is useful. Not without a good guide that focuses on that. Which most c books don't. The best way to learn it is with rust that actually tells you when you mess up.