The difficulty of writing self-referential data structures in Rust arises on HN often. Every time, the answer is, broadly, the same:

- It is certainly difficult

- Strategies and approaches from low-level languages which are at least cosmetically similar will probably be unavailing

- In some (many?) cases, crates (Rental, Petgraph, Spade) exist that already implement them. Their design can be studied

- There's an entire book (http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/too-many-lists/book/) devoted to writing linked lists in Rust. It's highly informative

Without wishing to explicitly criticise your approach to learning Rust, I'll note that for the vast majority of programmers, it's likely to be frustrating for quite a while.